


The Photographs at the Back of the Drawer

by ash818



Series: Legacy [6]
Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Drabble Collection, F/M, Family Feels, Gen, Married Life, Married Oliver Queen/Felicity Smoak, Multi, Next-Gen, Queen Kids, Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-04-05
Updated: 2017-08-17
Packaged: 2018-03-21 10:14:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 18
Words: 30,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3688404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ash818/pseuds/ash818
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Drabbles from the Legacy 'verse.</p><p><b>Chapter 18:</b> Terry McGinnis learns the Big Green Secret.</p><p>Set during <a href="archiveofourown.org/works/2028324">Legacy</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Anniversary Letters

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was written as a birthday present for the lovely effie214.

November 11, 2018

Felicity,

My grandmother married Jacob Dearden two weeks before he deployed to the Pacific Theater with a Marine unit that would ultimately suffer an eighty-eight percent casualty rate. The first time she heard the story, my always practical mother didn’t understand. “Something could have happened to him five minutes after he set foot on Peleliu. Then what would you have done?”

According to Mom, my grandmother drew herself up and said, “Then I would have been his wife for two weeks.”

No amount of time could ever be enough, Felicity, but I am grateful for every hour you’ve given me. If things don’t go our way tomorrow, I want you to know that a year as your husband was the great joy and privilege of my life. I’m not afraid of what’s coming, not with you beside me. Not with your voice in my ear.

Thank you for your faith in me.

Happy anniversary, beautiful. I love you always.

OQ

 

November 11, 2027

Felicity,

Every time I sit down to write this, Abigail starts screaming her head off or Jon tries to jump off of something high. So forgive me if I’m brief.

You, me, and the best Osso Bucco in town. Then we have reservations at the Monteleone, and I am going to show you exactly how I feel about you.

All night long.

Love you, Felicity. See you soon.

OQ

 

November 11, 2042

Felicity,

You looked beautiful the day you agreed to marry me. I still remember your blue dress and the lipstick smudge we couldn’t quite wipe away before we met Dig and Lyla to tell them the news.

We’ve come a long way down a strange road since then, haven’t we?

I see a deeper beauty in you now. I see it in the body that has carried our children, protected our family, loved and comforted me when I least deserved and most needed it. I see it in your kind heart and sharp wit, in your bravery and unwavering strength.

If my only legacy on this earth were the love I have shared with you, the family we have made from it, and the home we have built together, my time here would have been well spent.

Thank you for the privilege of walking by your side these twenty-five years.

I’m hoping for at least twenty-five more. What do you say, Солнышко мое?

Love always,

OQ


	2. Anniversaries

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous asked:
> 
> what do oliver and felicity do to celebrate their anniversaries?

_November 11, 2018_

At 11:07 PM, Oliver finally stirs on the med table.

Felicity swivels her chair away from her workstation immediately and coasts the two feet to his side. Brushes a hand through his hair, then cradles his face. “Hey, there.”

His eyes come into focus, and he just looks at her for a long time. Probably her eyes are red and her nose is red and her hair is a mess. There may even be blood still smeared on her somewhere.

Finally he croaks, “So I lived. That’s great news.”

She smiles. “How do you feel?”

“Like I got shot.” When that fails to elicit anything but pursed lips, he admits, “I’m a little cold.”

She reaches for the thick gray blanket on the shelf nearby, but rather than unfold it, she tucks it under his head. Then she gets to her feet and says, “Scoot.”

He turns onto his uninjured side, and he lets out a couple of pained grunts as he slides over and makes room. She presses up against his chest, lays his bandaged arm over her waist, and hooks her knee over his hip.

“Better?” she says into his chest.

“Mmm, better.” Over her head, he catches sight of the time display on her computer screen. “It’s eleven-eleven. On eleven-eleven.” He closes his eyes and sighs deeply. “Happy anniversary.”

She kisses his tattoo. “I found your letter this morning. It was beautiful, Oliver.”

“I’m glad we get more time.”

Her voice is a little thick when she says, “I think you were right. It’ll never be enough.”

“But more is good.”

“More is good,” she whispers.

 

_November 11, 2027_

In the warm glow of the bedside lamp, the white sheets are golden. Her skin is golden, and her hair, and her smile too, and it should be a crime for any other kind of light to touch her than this.

“You’re beautiful,” he says, and it is the thousandth time. But it has meant a thousand things.

Tonight it means stretch marks gleaming silver on her breasts and belly when she arches under his touch - badges of courage no less than his mottled burn scars and asymmetrical keloids. It means the little worry line between her eyebrows and the knotted scar on her shoulder. It means ten years written on her skin.

“You’re pretty easy on the eyes yourself,” she says, grabbing his wrist to work his fingers deeper inside her. She closes her eyes and lets out a contented moan. “Oh, and so good at this.” Her smile leans toward slyness when she says, “Five out of five stars. Would marry again.”

He leans down to seal his mouth to her neck, right where the blood runs hot and close to the skin. She smells of sweat and her perfume and herself. Golden.

“You ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” he tells her.

 

_November 11, 2042_

It is 11:11, and they are just getting to dessert.

After autumn greens tossed in cider vinaigrette, after roasted asparagus and carrot souffle and beef tenderloin still red in the center, now there is chocolate cake with Kahlua frosting. Abby claims she made and frosted all three layers with absolutely zero help from Milena, “unless you count asking her _one question_  about getting the cake layers unstuck from the pans, but why would you count that?”

Jon seems to believe no one else can tell that his hand is resting on Tish’s thigh under the table. Judging by her faint blush, she knows exactly how sneaky he is not. They smile when they catch each other’s eyes, as if they have some grand secret between them.

Oliver is fairly certain he knows what it is.

“Happy anniversary, Mama,” Abby whispers, setting a slice of cake down in front of Felicity.

“Thank you. Oh, this already smells amazing. Coffee and chocolate, yes, please.”

“You’re absolutely positive you don’t want cake, Dad?”

He shakes his head. He has never much cared for sweet things.

She makes a dismissive little noise. “I guess you can have a happy anniversary anyway,” she says, scooting past his chair. “Though it’s hard to see how.”

He grabs her as she passes and gives her a good squeeze, then a little shake. She laughs and kisses the top of his head.

Maybe some sweet things.

He and Felicity plan to leave for wine country before dawn tomorrow morning. They’ll have a whole weekend to themselves at the vineyard they discovered on that long-ago road trip.

But tonight they linger at the table, and they never ask the time.


	3. White stick with two blue lines

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> nfinitegladness asked:
> 
> Oh man, Jon was the accident?! That reminds me of a line in one of the stories where Felicity says something about thinking Oliver would've never been ready for his own kids if he hadn't loved Elaine first. I'd assumed that meant they'd planned for Jon, so now I'm dying to know what their reaction was to the surprise!

Felicity held up the white stick with the two little blue lines, and it shook faintly in her hand. In the trash can behind her were three more identical tests.

Oliver stared at it wide-eyed.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Felicity said. “Not good timing. The League is trying to out-evil themselves again, Ra’s al Ghul personally wants your head on a platter, we don’t have a brilliant plan or even a regular plan, and this is just - this is not a good time to start carrying around a tiny helpless person under my dress.”

Still a little shell-shocked, he said, “Maybe not the best.”

She licked her lips. “So what are we going to do?”

His eyes finally flickered up from the test to meet her gaze. “What do you want to do?”

Her expression turned pained. “Oliver, I can’t - “

Before she could finish, he’d pressed his hand to her belly, just beneath her navel, fingers spread.

“ - I can’t give this up. Something we made. I can’t.”

He stepped around behind her, bent his head alongside hers with her hair catching in his stubble, and he wrapped her up with one arm. His other hand still lay flat over the pleats of her peplum dress.

“Does this scare you as much as it scares me?” she whispered.

He nodded.

“Please say something.”

“We’re going to get through this.” He squeezed her tighter. “All three of us.”

She let out a shaky breath, relaxing into his arms and laying her hand over his. “Okay. All three of us.”


	4. White for innocence

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Team-angel-coulby](http://team-angel-coulby.tumblr.com/) on tumblr made [this gorgeous edit](https://41.media.tumblr.com/1bbc97df29c9a7f04ae3e9be657de92f/tumblr_nmflv2cmHK1rre9mvo1_500.png). This ficlet was the result.

The breeze off the bay chases the afternoon heat from Riverview Cemetery, and even in the half-sheltered hallway of the mausoleum, it sets Tish’s black dress fluttering around her knees. The lilies over her arm sway faintly, and the plastic wrapping rustles around the white roses I picked up at the grocery store.

Tish’s fingers trace the letters of a marble face plate sealing an urn in its little nook, the last in a row of five. “And finally, Nadia Nicolescu,” she says, and I remember startling green eyes in a worn, wasted face, preserved forever in a mugshot for solicitation. “Lord, grant her the peace denied to her in life.” She looks across the row of names - the five unclaimed dead among Abel Cuvier’s victims - and she says, “Most merciful God, please bless them and keep them, may Your face shine upon them, and be gracious to them. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen.”

I’m not Catholic and I’ve never done much in the name of any of those people, so I don’t know if I’m supposed to say amen. Instead I start to unwrap the roses. The cheap plastic crumples loudly, and I stop.

“Thank you for coming with me,” Tish says, settling the lilies in the vase mounted at the end of the row.

I found these people in her father’s walk-in freezer. Seeing them to a decent resting place seemed like the least I could do. “Of course.”

Tish turns to me and holds out her arms for the roses. The plastic slides off easily in her small hands, and she starts slipping them in among the lilies one by one. “White for remembrance,” she says. “And for innocence.” She smiles faintly. “My mother spoke flower.”

“Excuse me?”

“ _Ah, Laetitia, un lys blanc pour le souvenir, une rose rouge pour l'amour_ ,” she says in a voice a few steps lower than her own. “The Victorians had a language of flowers. A purple hyacinth was an apology. A solid color carnation meant yes, and stripes meant no.”

“Did I bring the wrong kind?”

She smiles at me, soft and wistful. “No, you didn’t.”

“I wish you’d let me help.” I gesture vaguely at the five niches with their marble plates, none of which she let me pay for. She said her father’s life insurance covered it all.

“I can’t make up for what he did,” she says to the cement under our feet, “but let me try where I can.”

I shake my head. “None of that blood is on your hands.”

“Maybe not. But it was all over his.” She nestles a lily deeper into the arrangement, then clasps both hands in front of her. “And blood will stain every time.”

Yes. I know.

I reach past her to tug one white rose free from the arrangement. “This one’s for you.”

She gives me a very serious look.

“I don’t speak flower,” I say on a shrug. “It’s just something pretty that smells nice, ok? And it’s for you.”

For me too, maybe. For innocence.

When we leave the mausoleum with the first chirp of nightbugs, Tish is twirling the rose between her fingers.


	5. I can't save her from this

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> thebridgetonarnia asked:
> 
> "...in the last update felicity and oliver were talking over the comms and jon shut it off before they finished talking out of privacy (i literally screamed "OH COME ON!") so I was wondering if perchance you could tell us how the rest of that conversation went?"
> 
> An anon also asked:
> 
> "...There was a scene in your knew chapter where Jon gets a peak into Oliver being vulnerable regarding Abby and I was wondering, are we going to hear that dialogue between Felicity and Oliver in the next chapters? I’d be really interested in hearing their thoughts more on our precious Abby."

**  
**Felicity waited until Oliver had closed the door behind them to sink heavily onto their bed. “Oh, God. Now what do we do?” **  
**

The breath left him in a long, slow sigh. “Another medication? A different therapist?” He tipped his head back, eyes hooding over in exhaustion. “Stand over her and force her to do her schoolwork?”

Felicity sighed. “I guess it always takes longer to put yourself back together than to fall apart.”

“Three years,” Oliver said, shaking his head. “She’s been fighting this on and off for three years.”

“Mostly, she wins,” Felicity said gently.

“You know, she looked me right in the eyes,” he said, tugging at his tie and ambling toward his dresser, “and told me she had A’s and B’s.”

Felicity tipped her head at him sympathetically.

“I thought I could tell when she lied to us,” Oliver murmured.

“She rubs her thumb and forefinger together.”

Oliver nodded. "I looked for that.” He stripped off his suit jacket and hung it over the back of Felicity’s desk chair. “Am I smothering her?”

Felicity closed her eyes. “Oliver, I really need you to stop coming up with reasons why this is your fault.” When she opened them again, the sympathy was still there, but it leaned toward weariness. “This is not about you.”

“I know that,” he said, nostrils flaring.

“Then why can’t you - ”

“If it were something I’d done or not done, maybe I could…” He bowed his head, white-knuckling the back of the chair.

The comm clicked on, and Felicity closed her eyes again. “Can it wait a few minutes?” At Jon’s answer, she nodded sharply. Then she held out a hand to Oliver. “Hey, come here.”

He looked up at her, eyes shining.

“Oliver, come here.”

He sank down next to her on the edge of their bed, and he leaned his head on her shoulder as Jon had just a few nights before. Thickly, he said, "Felicity, I don’t know what to do. I can’t save her from this.”

The comm clicked off, and Felicity cursed silently.

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this for them.”

Eyes welling up with him now, Felicity wrapped him up tight and murmured, “I know.” 


	6. Roadkill

At two in the morning, Abby calls me.

“Sorry to wake you,” she says on a sniffle.

“Are you ok?”

“I hit something with my car.”

I sit up in bed, and next to me Tish stirs. “What happened?”

“I hit a possum,” Abby says. “He’s hurt really bad - his little feet are squished - but he’s still alive. I don’t know what to do for him.”

I sink back against the pillows. “Nothing you can do. Get back in your car and go home.”

“I can’t just leave him to die. It’ll take a really long time,” she says, choking up. “I thought I should maybe, I don’t know, put him out of his misery? But I don’t know how.”

I let my head thunk back against the headboard. This is my first night off in two weeks, and I was finally going to get a full seven hours of sleep. “Hit him with a tire iron.”

“Jonny.”

I hold the phone away from me while I curse, and then I shove aside the coverlet. “Activate your GPS and stay there. I’m coming.”

Tish rolls over when I get out of bed, and she watches blearily as I pull jeans on. “Where are you going?”

“To kill a fucking possum,” I grumble.

“Oh. Your jacket’s on the back of the sofa.”

Five minutes later, I find Abby’s little coup pulled over on the side of Marconi Drive at the border of City Park. She sits cross-legged on the edge of the asphalt, not ten feet from a fuzzy shape in the road. By the light of her phone’s screen, she looks utterly miserable. She’s only had the car and the full license for three weeks, and bam, roadkill.

“Thank you for coming,” she says, getting to her feet when I get out of my car.

“‘S okay.” I grab the heavy duty work gloves in my trunk, and I tug them on as I walk over to the critter. “This your problem right here?” The possum’s front paws are crushed, pasting the thing to the asphalt. It stares dazedly right past my feet, head swaying faintly from side to side. “Poor little guy.”

“I didn’t see him.”

“Even if you had, you don’t swerve off the road for a possum, ok?”

Abby hugs herself. “So what do we do?”

“I’ll take care of him. Go get in your car.”

Abby stays right where she is.

I sigh. “Okay.”

I pull my knife from its kydex sheath, and I crouch over the possum. It doesn’t even try to bite me when I turn its head aside. Its fuzzy sides rise and fall in fast, shallow breaths. No other living thing I’ve killed - duck, deer, man - has ever held so still for me, so close, while I did it.

I only hesitate for a moment.

Abby flinches at the jerk of my wrist, but she doesn’t look away. Instead she crouches next to me, just out of reach of the spreading bloodstain.

“I’m so sorry,” she tells the critter as we wait, and she reaches out uncertainly.

I push her hand down. “Don’t touch him, Abigail.”

When the possum is completely still, she looks at me. “What do we do with him?”

I raise an eyebrow at her, because I did not sign up for possum burial detail. “We put him back where he came from.”

I pick it up by its tail, and I ignore the drip-drip on the asphalt as I carry it over to the bushes. I set it down, hidden in the tall grass and brush. Let nature take care of her own.

I strip off the gloves as I walk back to Abby, and I reach out to ruffle her hair. “Should I even ask what you were doing on the road at this time of night?”

She shakes her head.

“Go home. Don’t get caught sneaking back in.”

We get back in our separate cars. 


	7. Storage space

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> geniewithwifi asked:
> 
> Ash. Please. Do one thing for me. I need like air and oxygen and water to see the scene with Oliver and Felicity down in the OG Team Arrow Cave. Please.

“It’s not even pass-coded anymore,” Felicity says sadly, transferring one of the two spindly glasses to her left hand. At the push of a button the door slides open. There is darkness below and the smell of dust.

They glance over both shoulders, and Oliver leads the way with the champagne bottle in his hand. Felicity flips on the stairwell lighting, the door slides shut behind them, and the music of the party cuts to a faint hum.

They take the stairs at a businesslike pace, her heels clicking on the metal, and a moment after his feet touch ground level Oliver hits the lights.

Storage space.

In place of racks of weaponry, there now stand pallets of cleaning supplies and row upon row of pretty white folding chairs. Where the world’s most elegantly constructed computer system once stood, there is now an island of stacked tea lights in clear plastic boxes. To the right of the stairwell, a big service elevator has been installed to schlep these things up to ground level in the early evening and then back down as the last guests say their tipsy goodbyes.

Felicity twists on the spot to take it all in. “Well, you’re much less likely to get impaled if you trip.”

Oliver leans in to inspect to the bullet holes in one cement wall. “I wonder what they think these are.”

Felicity sets the two champagne glasses down on a folding table full of candlesticks, and Oliver leaves the bottle next to them. Separately they walk the corridors between boxes. They find bolt holes in the floor that once secured glass cases. A patch of darker paint where a breaker routed the massive amounts of power they used to draw. Their shoes are loud on the dull, scuffed black floor.

Once it had a mirror shine.

When they meet again in front of the candlesticks, Felicity steps up to Oliver’s side and props her chin on his shoulder. He reaches for the bottle, opens it with a faint pop and a wisp of vapor, and pours two flutes.

“To Dig and Lyla,” he says, passing her one.

She accepts with a faint smile. “To how far we’ve come.”

They drink. And then their eyes meet, comfortably silent, and for a moment it hardly matters what room they are standing in, looking at each other like that.

But they are in this one.

“This is where I fell in love with you,” Oliver reminds her.

She smiles. “Me first.”

He rests a hand on the small of her back. “I’m pretty sure it was me.”

“All right.” She takes the glass from his hands and sets both of them on the table again. Runs her palms up his lapels, goes on tiptoe to clasp her hands behind his neck. “Can we say I fell in lust first?”

“I have never argued that point.”

She eases back onto her heels, pulling him with her a few inches. “Who do you think we would be,” she says slowly, cocking her head, “if it hadn’t been for…” She glances around the room. “For this?”

He raises his chin, fixes his eyes on the wall behind her. Shakes his head. “I don’t like to think about that.”

“We owe him a lot,” she whispers. “You and me and Dig and…” She rests her chin on her chest. “We all do.”

He looks down at her, brows knitting. “Who?”

“The Arrow.”

He holds her close with sudden fierceness, and he presses his mouth to her hair.

They sway under the buzzing fluorescents, wrapped as tightly around each other as ever they were when this space was home and “I love you” was thrilling for its newness. When the future was a faraway horizon rather than two sandy-haired kids with his smile and her laugh.

If they cry, there is no one to see.


	8. Lait chaud a la cannelle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On Tumblr, Anonymous asked:
> 
> Hey ash! I know you have a lot on your plate, but would you ever consider writing a little drabble of Jon and Tish's first kiss from Tish's perspective?

Sleepy, rumpled Jonathan Queen munching an apple at the kitchen island was a problem.

Perhaps a mug of  _lait chaud à la cannelle_  would put him back to sleep before Tish could dwell too long on how much she’d like to finger-comb his mussed hair for him.

Months ago, she decided that she could be content just to be near him. He put her at ease and made her smile, and that should have been enough. In time, maybe he would adopt her as Abby had, and it would be nice to have a big brother. Someone who would drive across town at rush hour to change her tire, and for whom she would get out of bed to make snacks in the middle of the night.

Then she could hug him whenever she wanted. Jonathan Queen gave excellent hugs. Arms wrapped around her, crushing her to his chest, the smell of his soap and, underneath it,  _him_  -

Perhaps sisterly affection was an unreasonable goal.

She poured him a mug, and she could feel his eyes on her when he said, “Tish, how come you smell like a cookie?”

“New shampoo and lotion. Vanilla calms Abby down.”

His brow furrowed just the way his father’s did when he was presented with odd new information. “What do you mean?”

It had been an accident that Tish noticed at all. One night not long after the inauguration, when Abby’s nightmares and sleep deprivation were at their worst, she and Tish went on a baking spree. Abby was sliding cupcakes into the oven when a rogue elbow swiped a bottle of vanilla off the crowded counter. The glass shattered on the tile, and Abby jumped out of her skin. Through the next few seconds of shakes, Tish was sure she was about to have a full-on anxiety attack.

But instead, as pungent vanilla filled the kitchen, Abby sank to the floor, careful of the broken glass. She sat with her back to the cabinets, and she breathed deep. Deep and even, until she had a hold of herself.

“Don’t ask me why,” Tish said, watching steam twist from the foam atop her mug, “but if she starts to get upset, the smell of vanilla seems to help. Scent and memory and emotion are all intertwined, so it’s not so strange, really. It seemed like an easy way to…”

She looked up, and Jon was staring at her. If it made any sense at all, she would call the expression on his face  _hurt_.

She whispered, “Why are you looking at me like that?”

No, it wasn’t hurt. It was the blank confusion of someone who’d stumbled over a new obstacle on a familiar route, and who was only now getting his bearings. His Adam’s apple worked in a hard swallow, and then he was stepping into her space, blocking out the soft light over the oven and taking up all the air, and he was too big and too tall and too close. His thumb brushed her lower lip as he took her face in his hands, and she suppressed a shiver. “What are you doing?”

Ridiculous question. She could smell the cinnamon on his breath. She knew what he was doing.

The night of the riots, he laid his head on her arm right here in this kitchen, and for the first time it occurred to her that she could just lean over and kiss him. She could taste the honey and nutmeg on his mouth. Kiss him gently, aching and exhausted as he was. Kiss him chastely, almost. If she led him upstairs to bed, he might even have let her hold him as he fell asleep.

That way lay heartbreak. If she didn’t lose him to the next girl who turned his head, it would be to the hood or the streets or the night. Crusades claimed souls as well as lives. Ask her father.

“I’m going to kiss you now,” Jon said very quietly, “and it is going to be dead fucking serious. Okay?”

One way or another, she was going to break her heart over Jonathan Queen. This way seemed as good as any. “Okay.”

Very deliberately, he pressed his lips to hers, and yes,  _this_  way, with her heart beating like hummingbird wings in her chest. With his hands in her hair and the taste of his mouth and the smell of him filling her senses. He was enough to drown in.

Perhaps that’s why she grabbed his wrists and held fast. The words were there in her head -   _please, I think I need a moment_  - but all she managed to say out loud was, “Jonathan?”

“Right before she went to your house the night Risdon showed up there, Abby upended a bottle of vanilla over my head.”

“Beg pardon?”

Talking too fast, as he did when he was trying to catch up with his own runaway mouth, he said, “I showed up in the hood still smelling like a pastry shop, which was hard not to notice when I jumped on her.”

Belatedly, Tish realized he was answering her question from thirty seconds ago, before the compass spun and refused to settle again.

His mouth quirked. “That’s why she wasn’t all that surprised when I told her the truth.”

Oh, damn him. Of course the damned vanilla was connected to him. And there was no call - none whatsoever - for him to look so shocked that he was his little sister’s knight in shining armor. As anyone with sense would know: “I told you she felt safe with you.”

He licked his lips, and his voice was oddly tentative when he said, “Are you going to keep - ”

“Yes.” Until Abby got sick of the smell. “I’ll keep wearing it.”

He nodded faintly, and Tish steadied herself on his wrists.

She felt foolish for ever believing she had anything to fear from another woman. The real threats were the ones she could do nothing to guard against - a bullet in a back alley, a fall from a rooftop, the smallest distraction. All the promises she wanted from him now, she knew he couldn’t make in good conscience. 

But he was staring at her mouth, and it was plain on his face how badly he wanted to kiss her again.

He’d as good as told her he was hers if she wanted him. How could she offer him anything less?

This time, when he kissed her, she clung. She tipped her head back and let herself fall open to him. Opened her mouth to his tongue, and when he lifted her onto the counter, she opened her legs for him to stand between. Bared her throat to his kisses.

He wrapped her tighter around him, and he had just started to scoop her up when a tremor ran through him. At first she thought he was struggling with her weight, which made no sense at all. He had set her on the counter like she was nothing.

Then she realized. “Jon. You should rest your leg.”

His arms tightened around her possessively, and somehow that was enough to start a smile spreading across her face. “You know, I think it hurts less when I’m kissing you.” With his chest pressed to hers she felt his voice as much as heard it. “Let’s do that some more.”

Not a minute ago, she had been worrying about blood and bullets and bodies, but here he was grabbing her like a teddy bear and angling for more making out. Alongside the rush of heat and the heady thrill, she felt the strangest lightness in her chest. Relief, maybe. She had leapt, and his arms were waiting.

She couldn’t help herself - she laughed. “You’re supposed to be catching up on sleep,  _mon petit chou_.”

His arms shifted around her. “What’s a moppity shoe?”

“Don’t worry about it.” He’d have a hard time looking it up if he couldn’t spell it, so she might get away with it for a while longer. “Come on, let me down from here, and we’ll go up to bed.”

He pulled back to look her in the eyes, and oh God, even this bright, hopeful smile had something dirty in it. “You’re coming to bed with me?”

“I am extending an invitation to sleep in my room,” she said past the flutter in her stomach. “You’re very warm, and I think you’ll make an excellent space heater.”

“Oh, I will heat your space,” he said with all the confidence of someone casting a much better line. “I will heat it so hot.”

Giggling, she leaned into his shoulder and breathed him in again. “Come on.”

Upstairs beneath her borrowed down comforter, Jon sank back against the pillows with sudden drowsiness. A bolt of heat shot through her when he pulled her onto his chest, and his hand behind her head, pulling her down into his kisses, made her conscious of his body’s hard edges beneath her. Here in her bed, at ease as if he had always belonged in it, he seemed larger than the space he took up.

Then he yawned, and there was nothing larger-than-life about that.

Tish smiled and kissed his forehead. “Sleep, Jon.”

“Not done kissing you,” he mumbled.

“I’ll be here in the morning.”

Their height difference was far less inconvenient lying down. She wedged herself into the space between his arm and his side, where she fit very neatly, and she reached for his hand where it lay carelessly across his stomach. She dragged her fingertips over his scarred knuckles. Then she lay her palm flat against his, just for the pleasure of watching his long, blunt fingers curl over the tops of hers.

“Hey,” he said into her hair.

She nestled down closer. “Hmm?”

In a voice already rough with sleep, he said, “Does this mean you might want to be my girl?”

She was already his girl. She suspected she had been his girl for some time, and why on earth did he think he was in her bed, if not because he was her boy?

She might have cried, if she weren’t so close to giggling. She might have giggled, if she weren’t on the verge of tears. “Yes, it does. Very much.”

“Good,” he said on a sleepy sigh. “That’s good.”

She lay on his shoulder for a long time, smiling too hard to sleep.


	9. "I once capsized a boat with my foot caught in the main sheet"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On Tumblr, Anonymous asked:
> 
> In TMUTH Jon talks about his fear of drowning stemming from a sailboating incident when he was a kid. Oliver pulled him out but that incident must have been at least as traumatic for him as Jon. Maybe way more. Can you give us the story from Oliver's perspective?

“You’re going to single-hand it in this air?” Oliver said over the whipping of rigging in the wind.

Jonny shrugged, as Oliver helped him walk the dinghy down the floating dock on its dolly. “It’s supposed to lay down in the next couple hours. And besides,” he said, casting Oliver an irritable look, “you’re going to be staring over my shoulder, aren’t you?”

There had been a time, not even that long ago, when Jonny thought hanging out with Dad was the height of cool. He used to practically bounce up and down on his heels, saying, “We could take the boat out.” That had definitely happened. Oliver remembered it.

When it stopped happening, people told him thirteen was a difficult age. Apparently so was fourteen.

Fifteen wasn’t looking good either.

“You want to do wind sprints, you’ll need someone to set the marks,” Oliver said calmly. It would not have been helpful to add,  _That’s too much sail for one kid in too much breeze. Like hell you’re going out alone._

Together, they slipped the 420 into the water. Jonny pulled his lifejacket over his spray top, climbed in, and lowered the rudder and centerboard. Sheets and tiller in hand, he said, “Good to go.”

Oliver shoved the bow away from the dock. The sails filled, and the little fourteen-footer listed hard for a moment before Jonny flattened her out.

Oliver took his time replacing the dolly and then ambling down the dock to the Boston Whaler, giving Jonny a long head start out into the harbor and past the jetty. He caught up fast in the powerboat, even with the wind and waves against him. He set a round orange buoy, then anchored twenty boatlengths directly downwind of it.

“All right, windward-leeward, fast as you can,” he yelled into the wind. “It’s a short course, so it’s all boatspeed. Let’s see what you’ve got.”

Jonny nodded and roll-tacked hard. The jib sheet slipped his hand on the new tack, and he nearly dunked himself as the boat rocked to windward.

He glanced at Oliver, as if daring him to say something.

Oliver busied himself pulling a bottle of water from the cooler.

For the next half hour, he sat back on the bench seat, keeping track of the windspeed, timing Jonny’s laps, and occasionally calling out, “You’re sliding on the tops of those waves. Yes, better! Flat is fast,” or, “Nice mark rounding!”

The wind did not lie down. Instead it picked up a knot as Jonny raced his previous time around the course. A couple of times he roll-tacked too hard and put her in the water, but each time he stepped neatly over the gunwale and onto the centerboard to right her again.

He was running before the wind, just a few boatlengths from Oliver and getting ready to jibe, when he went just a little too far by the lee, and a wave destabilized him.

“Get control, get control,” Oliver muttered as the boat wobbled.

Nope. Death roll. Then the next wave completely turtled the boat, and Oliver sighed, waiting for Jonny’s head to pop up in the water next to her. Kid would probably be cursing like - well, like a sailor.

But he didn’t.

Cold prickled over Oliver’s neck and forehead. Perhaps Jonny came up on the leeward side, where he’d be hidden by the overturned hull. He would come swimming around any second. Oliver got to his feet, craning his neck to see. “Jonny?”

No reply.

Something in Oliver’s chest clenched up painfully.

Chill bay water shocked his system, and the crash of waves suddenly muted when he plunged in. A few feet past his outstretched hand, he could see nothing but dark green. He stroked for the sailboat, slowed by the weight of his sodden fleece and the Sperrys he hadn’t paused to kick off.

Finally his hand closed on the gunwale. “Jonathan!” he barked one last time. Then he dove under the hull.

In the shadowy cold of the upside-down cockpit, Jonny thrashed frantically. Not concussed, then. Caught in the lines.

Oliver grabbed his shoulder firmly, hoping it wouldn’t startle him into inhaling water. Jonny’s hand closed in a vise grip on Oliver’s forearm, and he yanked  _hard_. The force of it shocked half a lungful of air out of him. A drowning child was one thing. A half-grown man in a panic was a danger to his rescuer.

Oliver grabbed onto the stay, just out of Jonny’s reach, and forced himself to slow down. Observe.

Jonny’s right foot kicked wildly, and it jerked to a stop six inches from the mainsheet block. There. A white line, which seemed to glow in the dimness, tangled around Jonny’s boot.

Oliver reached into his pocket for the knife he kept there. Flicked it open blindly.

_Don’t kick, Jonny. Please God don’t kick the knife. Just hold still for two seconds._

He didn’t hold still; he strained at the end of his tether. Under tension, the line popped easily under one stroke of the blade, and Jonny pulled free of the mainsheet. Oliver grabbed a handful of his spray top and dragged him to the surface.

Jonny took a gasping breath the second his head breached the water, and he bobbed in his lifejacket. Oliver hefted him onto the upturned hull and let him lay there, coughing and spluttering and retching up brackish water.

“Jonny?” Oliver demanded.

“I’m okay,” Jon said, croaky and nauseated between coughs. “It’s fine.”

Oliver sank back into the water on a long, shaky exhale. Then he clung to the lip of the gunwale, panting like he’d run a marathon and trembling all over.

It was tempting to be angry.  _God damn it, Jonathan, how many times have I told you to keep the lines clear?_

Then he imagined what might have happened if he’d let Jonny go out alone, and his vision blacked out a bit at the edges.

Deep breaths. One. Two.

Five years in exile and seven in the hood. Funny, how he had believed he knew fear.

On the upturned hull, Jonny slowly got his coughing under control. He was shaking too, pale and kitten-weak. Cheek pressed against the fiberglass, he frowned at Oliver. “You okay?”

“The water’s sixty degrees,” Oliver said quietly. “I’m not wearing foul weather gear.”

“Sounds like we should get you back in the Whaler then,” Jonny said, pushing himself up to sitting.

“You feel up to swimming?”

Jonny visibly steeled himself. “Yeah, sure.”

He wasn’t. His life jacket kept him afloat, and he made a vague attempt at a swimstroke every few feet as Oliver towed him to the Whaler. Oliver didn’t wait around for him to struggle with the swim ladder; he just climbed up first and pulled Jonny after him.

Jonny stumbled and dripped his way to the forward bench seat, and he plopped down gracelessly.

Oliver sank into a crouch - damn his bad knee - and squeezed his son’s shoulders. “Are you all right?”

Jonny wouldn’t meet his eyes. “I told you. I’m fine.”

Oliver pressed his lips together. Nodded. “Okay. Stay right here.”

The 420 had drifted even farther from the Whaler. It took a while to swim back out, right her, sail her back to the Whaler, and tie her up for a tow.

When he’d had a rest, Oliver started the Whaler’s engine. Jonny got to his feet, obviously intending to climb back in the sailboat.

“Sit down,” Oliver said.

“You want to tow her unmanned in these waves?” Jonny said. “Might break something.”

Oliver closed his eyes. “Just sit down, please.”

Jonny sank back onto the bench seat. A few minutes toward home, he pulled his legs up, hugged his knees, and huddled against the console. He let himself rock with the motion of the boat.

When Oliver reached over the controls to lay a hand on his shoulder, he didn’t pull away.


	10. Secrets and lies

_March 2044_ **  
**

“My first night in Gotham in three months, and you drop me in a dumpster.”

McGinnis chuckles, because he is that kind of asshole, and he doesn’t look up from buttoning his shirt. “It was sawdust and tree branches or hard asphalt, man. What did you want me to do?”

“First round’s on you tonight.” My Sperrys squeak on the sleek black floor of the Bat Cave (“Stop calling it that,” he always says) when I take a step toward him and point at his chest. “You know what? All of the rounds are on you tonight.”

“God, you’re a whiner.”

“And I want pain meds.”

He rolls his eyes. “Top drawer, to the right.”

When the old man was in charge, these drawers were pristinely organized. In the year and a half since Wayne’s given him free rein, McGinnis’ own idiosyncratic filing system has taken over, and I have to go digging past data keys and Ace bandage rolls to find the pill bottles. About halfway back, my hand brushes something velvety. I pull it out to clear a path.

It’s a tiny jewelry box.

I turn it over in my hand, and I pop it open. Inside is a single diamond on a plain silver band. “The hell is this?”

He snatches it out of my hand.

“Is that for Dana?”

He closes it gently, not meeting my eyes. “No, for my other girlfriend.”

I stare at him. Then I nod slowly.

McGinnis has been dating his high school sweetheart on and off for the past ten years, and for two of their breakups I had front row seats to the shit show. They weren’t on speaking terms for the entirety of his senior year, but two seconds after he moved back to Gotham they were all over each other. He flakes or fibs or fucks up, and she leaves him. Then he works his ass off to get her back, and they’re disgustingly happy again, all in an endless cycle with lots of drunken bitching in between.

And now he wants to put a ring on it. The nicest thing I can say is, “Bold move, man.”

He looks up at me, and his eyes narrow. “You can’t just…. just back me on this?”

I look at the floor, because wow, this is uncomfortable. “Would you buy it, if I pretended this was an awesome idea?”

“Right.” He turns his back on me and tucks the box into a different drawer, under a pile of spare chargers. “Because you’ve finally managed to take a relationship past the six-month mark, and you’re the expert now.”

My fists ball at my sides. “You’re going to come clean, right? ‘I’m the Bat, here’s a ring.’”

His eyes snap over to me.

“No? You’ve been lying to her for four, going on five years now. Yeah, I guess go ahead and lie to your fiancee too. Then you can lie to your wife.”

He slams the drawer shut. “You self-righteous prick. How soon do you think you would have been straight with Tish, if Risdon hadn’t taken it out of your hands?”

I take a slow, fuming breath. “She doesn’t even know you, man.”

McGinnis leans back against the dresser. Tips his chin up. “How long did you leave Abby in the dark, scared and stumbling around blind?”

Heat washes over me. A muscle jumps next to my nose, and my lip curls.

“But it’s always do as you say and not as you do.”

I turn on my heel and stalk to the door. “Marry her, McGinnis. I’m sure it’ll work out great. Best fucking wishes.”

 

The night I fly back into Starling, Dad and I go down to the lair to spar. The third time he lands a punch that a seventh grader should have been able to dodge or parry, he finally asks me, “What happened in Gotham, Jon?”

I sniff, shake my head, and dart in for a left jab. “Just McGinnis being a fucking moron about Dana. News at ten.”

Dad slows the pace, turning this into more of a drill than a fight. “They broke up again?”

I snort. “Dumbass bought a ring.”

Dad raises his eyebrows faintly, but moves without comment into the next form. Then he decides to make this a clinch fight, and from a collar and elbow position I finally manage a hip throw. He lands on his side with a grunt.

“Let me guess,” Dad says as I yank him to his feet. “You told him what you thought of that plan?”

I reach for the stack of towels, toss one to him, and wipe down my sweaty face. “He doesn’t trust her with his night job, but he’s going to live with her and give her power of attorney and maybe have kids with her someday? How the hell does he think that’s going to work?”

Dad towels at the back of his neck. “I know you’ve never gotten along with Dana.”

The first time I met her, McGinnis and I were stumbling into her apartment at three in the morning, and we accidentally put a hole in her living room wall. I patched the drywall the next morning, but from that day on, I was the Bad Influence Friend. “This is not about that.”

Dad just looks at me.

I toss the towel aside and look away, grumbling, “This is like ninety percent not about that.”

“So you pissed him off. And then what?”

“And then he told me to shove it. Apparently it rang a little hollow coming from the guy who lied to Abby for almost three years.” I yank the mini fridge open. “As if that were remotely the same thing.” The first water bottle I grab escapes me and bounces off the floor. I snatch it up.

Dad sinks onto the weight bench, regarding me with sympathy.

I uncap the bottle, and my fingers play with the plastic ring. “It’s not the same, but then again, it is, isn’t it?”

Dad’s eyes slide almost involuntarily over to the glass cases full of his gear. “It’s been my experience,” he says, glancing at the floor, “with the people I love, I’ve regretted more lies than truths.”

I glare at the mouth of the bottle in my hand, and I shift my weight over my feet. “He said I left her in the dark, scared and… how did he put it?” I let out a bitter little huff. “‘Stumbling around blind.’”

Dad sighs. “Depression and anxiety are complicated, Jon. You didn’t do that to her.”

The therapist told us time and again that no single event causes these things, that my grandmother’s struggles pointed to a family predisposition, and that no two people respond to trauma the exact same way. But still. “Trying to smother her in bubble wrap definitely didn’t help.”

Dad sits up straighter, shoulders coming back, and looks me right in the eyes. “We meant well. But no, it didn’t.”

I realize I’ve left the fridge door hanging open, and I hip-check it closed. “Just proves my point about Dana.”

Dad nods, getting to his feet. “You want first shower?”

And, for a while at least, that’s the end of it.

 

Not a month later, McGinnis calls again. As if we’d never fought and as if he was never planning to propose to anyone, the first words out of his mouth are, “I need your help on this case.”

He describes a pretty routine arms deal, and I wonder if he’s being cagey again. Wayne’s paranoia has rubbed off over the years, and he doesn’t share more information than he has to, no matter how secure the line is.

When I fly out - because of course I do - it’s exactly what it sounded like. Max talks us into the building, we fuck up a few deserving faces, and it’s done. Easy. He could have handled it himself.

When we get back to the Cave (“Seriously, stop fucking calling it that”), I lean down and mutter to Max, “Why am I even here?”

She looks past me, reaches for her coat, and says loud enough for McGinnis to hear, “I’m turning in early tonight. You boys have fun.”

We’re going out?

“I owe you a few drinks, don’t I?” he says, slipping his wallet into his pocket.

I guess we’re going out.

He takes me to a dive bar in an up and coming arts district, and we watch the girls on the dance floor and bring each other up to date on friends and family.

Abby’s doing better, yeah. His mom sold the house that he and his brother grew up in, and Matt is pissed. Elaine’s wedding is coming up, and she asked me to stand up with her. Wayne’s most recent surgery went well, maybe bought him a few years.

We’ve always been able to do this - tell each other to fuck off, then come back and hang out like nothing ever happened. But this time it feels like we’re waiting for something.

Three drinks in, he finally says it: “I told her.”

“You - what?”

He glares at the vintage X Ambassadors poster a few feet to the left of my head. “Dana. I told her the truth.”

I set my drink down and put both feet on the floor, because this is some serious shit. “You mean the big black pointy-eared truth?”

He nods, just once.

Well, okay then. That’s a helpful clarification there, buddy. “And?”

He blows air through his teeth. “And nothing. That’s it. We’re done.”

“I don’t…” I frown at him. “I don’t know what that means.”

“I mean I just told her that I’ve been keeping a huge, life-altering secret for…” He closes one eye, glances at the ceiling, doing the math. “Eight years? Nine?”

“Four.”

He shrugs. “Technically, four since I first went out in the cowl. But you know it started before that.”

All right, yeah. For him in started in high school, when he stumbled into Wayne’s basement. “But it’s not like you were keeping an ‘I disembowel cats for fun’ secret, or even an 'I have three other girlfriends and six kids’ secret.”

He takes a long pull of his beer.

I lean my elbows on the table. “This is an 'I save people’s lives’ secret.”

“She seemed kind of focused on the part where I could have died, and she never would have known what happened to me. Or she could have gotten mixed up in it somehow - which, by the way, is exactly why I didn’t tell her - and she wouldn’t have had a clue why.”

“So she’s pissed about the lying, but not about the mask? That sounds like it could be a good thing.”

McGinnis gives a hollow chuckle. "You don’t know Dana. The lying is…” He shakes his head. “No, there’s no coming back from that.”

I lean back in the booth. “Shit.”

“She said, ah.” He stares at the table with this pained sort of smile and quotes: “You have so little respect for me that you could lie to my face over and over again for years.”

Okay, that strikes a nerve. Abby could have said the same when she found out about the hood. Any number of people could say it tomorrow. Keeping the secret mostly requires keeping my mouth shut, but sometimes I still lie to people’s faces - people I trust, people I care about. Lies of omission, but occasionally straight-up steaming bullshit.

“It’s not about respect,” I start to say.

But McGinnis cuts me off. “She asked me how she was ever supposed to trust me again.”

Because Terry McGinnis is the most trustworthy motherfucker on the planet, that’s why. You take him into a firefight, he will cover your six or die doing it. You need backup, he will fly across the fucking country.

But I don’t say that, because Dana doesn’t need him to do those things.

She needs him to show up to her graduation on time, stay the whole meal when her parents invite them to dinner, and go with her when she wants an adventure in some faraway country. She needs him to be home when he says he will, or tell her the truth about why he wasn’t.

“Give her time,” I say quietly. “You’ll earn it back.”

He takes a deep breath, opens his mouth, and closes it again. Glares at the floor, shakes his head.

“You’re sure?”

“She said she was done,” he says hoarsely. Then he clears his throat and says on a shrug. "You know, done with me. Sounded pretty final.”

I slide my old fashioned closer to him, because he sounds like he could use something stronger than beer.

He looks at the lowball glass, and then he looks at me with faint pity in his face. “I’m good. Thanks.”

All right then. I am officially out of helpful things to do here.

“Anytime you want to say I told you so,” he says, and one corner of his mouth quirks into a smile.

“No,” I say quietly. “I really don’t.”

We have another round - I don’t let him pay - and we don’t talk about Dana Tan again for a long, long time afterward.

Sometimes this job just fucking sucks.

 

 


	11. New Year's in Gotham

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A couple months after accidentally blurting out "I love you," Jon takes Tish to Gotham to ring in the new year.

“New Year’s in Gotham,” Jon said, yanking the blanket up over them. “What do you think?”

Tish burrowed her cold feet between his shins. “I haven’t been home since I left for SCU.”

“Stop that! Holy shit, put some socks on.”

Instead she rubbed her feet up and down, trying to generate a little heat.

He sighed. “So, Gotham. You can show me your favorite whatevers, and then McGinnis wants to take us out for New Year’s Eve.”

“It’s not really in my budget right now.”

He shrugged. “Don’t worry about the money.”

“Jonathan.”

“It’s not a big deal. Don’t make it one.”

She had to admit, “There are some people I’d like you to meet.”

He grinned. “Sure. They like to party?”

Their first afternoon in Gotham, she took him to a neighborhood in slow decline, led him up a flight of narrow stairs, and into the tiny apartment where Ms. Katherine Lin had lived for almost forty years. Against the wall, taking up most of the living room, stood the piano Tish learned to play on.

“This is your young man?” Ms. Lin said, leading them back to her kitchen.

“His name is Jonathan,” Tish said.

Ms. Lin paused to look him up and down critically. “But he is too tall for you.” She peered at Tish through her thick glasses. “How do you kiss him?”

Tish blinked at her. “Ms. Lin.”

The old lady laid a hand on Jon’s forearm, grinned up at him, and gave him a couple of pats. “With a step ladder, perhaps?”

“Ma’am.” Jon was struggling not to laugh. “You’re grinning at me like you’ve got plenty more ideas where that came from.”

Ms. Lin laughed her dry, cackling laugh, kissed Tish’s burning cheeks, and made tea for all three of them.

The next night, under bursting fireworks with the wind rushing over the rooftop, they ushered in the New Year with Max and Terry. Wrapped in scarves, huddled together against the cold, the four of them passed around a bottle of whisky.

“It's 11:59,” Max said, putting a hand to her pocket, where her phone must have vibrated.

Terry stepped up onto the ledge, wholly unconcerned with the four hundred foot drop, and looked down at the glittering crowd in the Square below. Max sighed, planted her feet, and grabbed the back of his jacket very firmly.

He frowned over his shoulder at her. “I’m not going to fall."

“It just makes me feel better.”

Tish smiled at the picture they made, right up until the shivers took over and her teeth started to chatter.

Jon turned his back to the icy wind and sheltered her in his lee. Then he unbuttoned his roomy, military-style coat, opened it to her, and said, "Come here."

She slid her arms around his waist and pressed her face to his cashmere scarf and sweater.

"There you go." He fumbled with gloved hands to fasten a button or two behind her back. "Just hold onto me, sweetheart."

Memory shot a bolt of heat through her whole body.  _Love you, love you,_ he had said in her ear that night. _Fuck, Tish, I love you._

She had not disbelieved him, precisely. But he had looked shocked to hear himself say it, and in the moment it had seemed wiser not to make it more than it was. His mouth had run away with him, as it so often did, and he would need time to catch up.

But she had heard the words many nights afterward, lying awake while he was somewhere out on the streets.  She could hear them now.

“Thirty seconds,” Max announced.

"Bye, 2042," Jon said. "Don't let the door smack you on the ass."

Tish squeezed him tighter. "There were good things this year."

She felt his chuckle as much as heard it. "Yeah, one or two."

"Twenty seconds," Max said.

Over the past year, Tish had watched Jon take one leap of faith after another, but not once had she jumped without seeing his arms held out for her first. Surrounded by a familiar skyline, with a little liquid courage in her blood, she went up on tiptoe and murmured in his ear, “Jonathan?”

“Hmm?”

“I love you.”

She should have told him long before, if only for the sun-coming-out smile on his face.

“I love you too.” He said it readily, like he had been waiting all this time, and all he needed was permission to say it again.

“And it’s ten, nine, eight,” Terry yelled, “five, four, three - “ He took a deep breath and bellowed from the rooftop, “It’s forty fuckin’ three, Gotham!”

As if in answer, the street below erupted in cheers. He grabbed Max and planted a noisy kiss on her cheek.

Jon and Tish didn’t quite manage a kiss. It was just two smiles mashed together, noses nuzzling at cheeks, giddy laughter in little puffs against each other’s lips.

Eventually, Terry threw a glove at them, and they had to stop.


	12. For their mutual joy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Oliver and Felicity's three-year-old serves as the ringbearer at Laurel's wedding.

The evening of Laurel Lance and Ted Grant’s wedding, no one gets punched in the face. No one gets kidnapped or held at gunpoint. No one even gets asked to leave for throwing back too much goldschlager and taking out the buffet table.

It is an altogether civilized affair, which is impressive given how many of the attendees can boast extensive rap sheets, concealed weapons, or small children.

Felicity watches a pack of them dash past the open bar, giggling and dodging grownups. Her three-year-old straggles at the tail end, stubby legs working as fast as they can. She is surprised to see that his tiny bowtie is not yet askew.

“Elaine Michaels Diggle!” she calls out.

The ringleader turns around with an expression strongly reminiscent of her father when Lyla is angry with him.

“No running inside. There’s a whole garden out there.” And all the picture-taking is over, so a little dirt can’t matter now.

Elaine nods solemnly, because she is the kind of child who cares deeply about getting gold stars next to her name at school, and she herds the other children toward the beautiful carved doors standing open to the patio. Just as Jonny catches up, Elaine takes his hand, and the best man/amateur photographer gets in another shot.

“Oh, that was a good one,” Roy says, straightening up and fiddling with the lens. The camera was a gift from Oliver and Felicity, and he may be a little obsessed. Thea has gotten far too much mileage out of the “point and shoot” jokes.

“Mm. Adorable,” Felicity agrees vaguely, frowning as Jonny stumbles at the edge of the patio. Elaine catches him halfway, but there’s the first grass stain of the night on the knees of his gray houndstooth trousers.

She and Oliver both tried to explain to Laurel that if she wanted a picturesque, well-behaved child in a tiny pristine tuxedo, she should look elsewhere. Three was a little young for a ringbearer anyway.

“He’ll be adorable,” Laurel insisted. “And if he’s a little off-script....” She smiled softly at them. “It’s a wedding, not a pageant. I’d really like him to be involved.”

Jonny was deeply upset that Hobbes was not invited to the wedding, but he perked up considerably when Mom called the bride to get express permission for him to attend. A stuffed tiger with a matted felt nose classed up the whole affair.

Especially after Oliver bought him a bowtie.

“For the tiger?” Felicity said, watching him clasp the black ribbon around Hobbes’ neck the afternoon of the wedding.

Oliver straightened the bow and set Hobbes on the dining room table. “The invitation says formal dress.”

A couple of hours ago at the ceremony, Jonny was at his photogenic best, as Felicity noted with pride. Stationed in the row of bridesmaids between Thea and Joanna de la Vega, she watched with a smile as Oliver knelt in the church doorway, gave Jonny’s lapels a couple of last minute tugs to straighten them, and pressed the satin pillow into his hands. Then he gave the kid a little pat between the shoulder blades to send him to the altar.

Felicity couldn’t hear Oliver from that distance, but she saw on his lips: “Go see Mom.”

Completely unfazed by the two hundred eyes on him, which he seemed to take as his due, Jonny proceeded down the aisle at a saunter. Hobbes was tucked under one arm, and in the other hand the silk pillow hung at a slight angle.

He paused to look back at Dad, and Oliver nodded and gestured him along. Then he pointed at Felicity and mouthed  _ Mom _ . Jonny got moving again.

Three quarters of the way, a woman’s particularly florid hat caught Jonny’s eye, and he veered left to get a better look.

Felicity’s mouth rounded in apprehension. “Jonathan,” she muttered under her breath, as if she could magically summon him. “Over here, kiddo. Come on. Keep walking.”

A few feet away, the maid of honor choked on a giggle.

Jonny grinned at the woman with the extraordinary hat, as if she had just made the best joke in the world. “There’s a bird on your head.”

Felicity resisted the temptation to close her eyes.

The District Attorney leaned down and said, just loud enough for Felicity to hear, “Plucked it myself.”

Jonny giggled. The professional photographer and Roy’s cameras both clicked. There was a chorus of  _ awwww _ s.

Felicity took a few steps forward and knelt next to the foremost pew, trying to make eye contact and coax the kid all the way down.

“Shouldn’t you go see your mom?” the D.A. prompted.

Jonny squeezed Hobbes tighter, twisted toward Felicity, and nodded. “I’m the ringbareder.”

At the end of the aisle, Felicity nodded emphatically. You are, in fact, the ringbearer. Now get your butt down here.

“It’s a very important job,” the D.A. said, to Jonny’s evident satisfaction. “You should go right away.”

Jonny nodded sharply, and he took the rest of the aisle at a run. He smacked into Felicity’s chest, where he hid his face with sudden shyness.

“Very good job,” Felicity whispered.

Jonny peeked up for confirmation.

“Yeah, you were a big hit. Go on, give Uncle Roy the pillow. Now come stand with us.”

She led him to the bridal party by the hand. Thea laid a hand on his head, on the theory that he couldn’t bolt with both of them holding on to him.

He watched with interest as Elaine came up the aisle strewing flowers. She made herself as tall and prim as she could, as if to show Jonny the proper comportment, but his attention wandered quickly. Halfway through her procession, he was otherwise occupied worming a finger into his nose.

Sara noticed first. She was hiding her giggles behind her extra-large maid of honor bouquet.

“Baby, if you could hold off for just a little while,” Felicity said, giving Jonny’s wrist a tug.

He wiped the evidence on Hobbes.

Then the music changed, and with one enormous rustle the entire church stood for the bride. Heads turned, necks craned, and all eyes sought her.

Felicity looked at Ted.

She remembered very clearly the expression on Dig’s face when he married Lyla double-twice-again-some-more. It had been all hope and contentment, and Felicity had felt his smile like actual physical warmth from a dozen feet away. She could still picture Roy standing in front of a judge’s desk with a flower in his buttonhole stolen from the landscaping in front of City Hall. He had grinned at Thea so hard it looked painful, holding his breath against an incredulous laugh at the idea that this was really truly happening.

Until the day she died, Felicity would remember Oliver’s smile as he waited for her under the chuppah. She had had to look away a couple of times for the sake of her mascara.

Today she looked at Ted’s big goofy lovestruck eyes, and she was two seconds into a melty smile when she felt a tug on her dress.

“Mom,” Jonny whispered. “Mom.”

“Hush. The bride is coming.”

“Can you hold Hobbes?”

After the fit he pitched about carrying him in the first place? “My hands are full, Jonny. And he’s your tiger.”

His grumbling quieted down just in time for Laurel to arrive at the altar, accompanied by her father in full dress uniform. Captain Lance held onto her hand a moment too long, and he nodded deeply to Ted.

He liked his new son-in-law, even if rather grudgingly. When Laurel first started complaining about the overzealous director of Bridge House who kept trying to argue her down from charging his mentees with felonies, the Captain raised an eyebrow at her. “That Grant guy? He’s really getting to you.”

“You know him?” Laurel said.

“Owns a boxing gym in the Glades. Real pain in the ass. But he does good work with those kids.”

“Not with this one. He seems to think the guy’s juvenile record is some kind of harmless joke, and that the way to redeem him from those aggravated assault charges is to teach him how to punch people harder and more effectively. The man is delusional.”

The Captain shrugged, and he listened with a quirk of a smile while she continued detailing Grant’s many flaws. Of all their friends and family, he seemed the least surprised when Laurel showed up to the Queens’ holiday party with her arm linked through Ted’s.

As the Captain once told Laurel at Oliver and Felicity’s dinner table, “You’ve dated much bigger assholes.”

Here at the altar,  the Captain shook Ted’s hand, kissed Laurel’s cheek, and went to sit down in the front row, just as Oliver slid in and took a seat next to him.

The plump lady in the vestments spread her hands and beamed at the congregation. “The union of husband and wife in heart, body, and mind is intended for their mutual joy, for the help and comfort given one another in prosperity and adversity.”

Felicity could not help looking at Oliver.

He smiled back at her.

A few rows behind him, Dig shifted slightly on the pew, and the corners of Lyla’s mouth twitched upward. Felicity was fairly certain that he had just laid his hand over hers, and she liked the idea that she and Oliver were not the only married couple in this big church who were silently asking each other:  _ Remember when it was us? _

Jonny chose that moment to start dancing on the spot.

“Sweetheart,” Felicity said, leaning down to whisper in his ear. “Why don’t you go sit by Dad?”

Jonny hurried over to the front row, and, completely unruffled, Oliver lifted him onto the pew. Then he retrieved the coloring book and crayons he had stashed with the hymnals.

Seventy percent of Oliver’s parenting style, as Barry Allen once observed, was hiding the crossbows before the other guy even arrived on the scene.

They made it through the service without further incident. After Ted bent Laurel back in a kiss and they led the way triumphantly up the aisle, Jonny presented Felicity with an orange scribble in a wobbly green circle. The green scribble next to the red curlicue, he informed her tartly when she tried to admire it as well, was meant for Aunt Law.

“Aunt Law?” Sara said in utter delight.

“He can’t say Laurel,” Oliver explained.

Sara had a good, long laugh at that - the kind they didn’t hear often enough from her. “I should come home more often. I miss all the good stuff.”

Oliver smiled and bumped her shoulder. “You really should.”

All in all, Felicity counts it a success. It helps that now she is two hours into the reception with a glass of wine in her hand, and that someone else is wrangling her three year old.

Next to her, Dinah Lance smiles fondly at Jonny dancing on Roy’s feet. Then she leans toward Felicity and says, “Do you think it might be time for a little brother or sister?”

Felicity gives her a wince of a smile. “Oh, look, it’s time for the bouquet toss.”

Joanna de la Vega refuses to put her drink down long enough to participate. Her concession to tradition is to stand nearby, one arm held out with a complete lack of enthusiasm. Sara clears two feet and lands in a perfect plie, roses in hand. She plucks one from the bunch and tucks it into Elaine’s headband.

Laughing, Felicity goes back to their white-draped table, where she finds Oliver nursing a drink. She plops down next to him and scoots the chair closer. “What’s on your mind, grumpy?”

He gives her one of those smiles-that-aren’t-smiles, and he shakes his head.

She waits.

“It was strange,” he finally admits, “seeing the two of them up there.”

She tangles her fingers with his. “I know that, once upon a time, you kind of thought it would be you up there next to her.”

He shakes his head. “It’s not that.”

She tilts her head patiently.

“After Tommy, I thought she might never…” He sighs. “She must have really let him go, if she’s ready to do this with someone else.”

Felicity leans over and rests her chin on his shoulder.

“I wanted her to,” Oliver says very quietly. “She deserves to.”

Felicity offers a rueful smile. “But somebody should be holding on to him?”

Oliver wipes condensation from the side of his glass. “I know she does, in her way.”

“So do you, in yours.”

He sighs and sets his glass down. “Hold that thought. Jonny’s climbing the buffet table.”

Sometime around the garter toss, which Felicity would honestly rather not watch, because she considers it one of the more awkward and tasteless American wedding customs, she heads for the restroom.

“Oh,” she says very quietly in the stall a minute later. She closes her eyes. “So not this month.” Nods to herself. “That’s all right. Maybe next month. Month after.”

There is absolutely no reason for her eyes to burn right now.

It has only been seven months since they started trying. But after the freak accident that was Jonny, Felicity sort of assumed that the moment the IUD came out, all Oliver would have to do was wink at her, and bam - pregnant.

She is being ridiculous.

Jonny is more than enough. He is plenty. He is everything they can handle, plus a few things they can’t. Five years ago at their own wedding, she would have considered it extraordinary good luck to be peacefully retired, both in one piece and excellent health, and raising a whip-smart little boy with the bluest eyes she has ever seen.

Now here she is, crying because it isn’t more.

Two deep breaths, and she goes back out into the party.

She has hardly even reached Oliver’s side before he is cupping a hand under her elbow and silently asking what’s wrong.

“Later,” she tells him. “Let’s enjoy tonight.”

And they do.

Oliver isn’t much for dancing, so Felicity gets plenty of time on the floor with Dig and Jonny and Elaine, all of whom want a turn with her. In the center of a loose circle of whooping onlookers, Thea and Roy attempt to one-up each other, and Jonny falls on his butt attempting to mimic them. Dig sweeps him out from underfoot just before he can start crying. “Hey, you’re okay,” he says firmly, and sets him on his feet.

Blinking in confusion, Jonny looks to Felicity.

She smiles reassuringly, leaning down to straighten his jacket. “You are just fine, sweetheart.” She pokes her finger through the grass-stained rip in his trousers, right at the knee. “The clothes are collateral damage.”

Laurel appears, panting slightly and smiling so wide she glows, and she holds her hands out to Jonny. “May I have this dance?”

Another questioning look at Mom.

“The bride wants to dance with you,” she says. “What do you say?”

He nods very seriously, and he lets Laurel scoop him onto her hip.

“This means you’re free, doesn’t it?” a voice behind Felicity says, and suddenly Sara is sweeping her into a spin.

A little after eleven, they find Jonny asleep on a velvet sofa in the foyer, Hobbes tucked under his arm. Elaine sits next to him, kicking her feet and playing with her mother’s phone. Oliver lifts Jonny onto his shoulder, limp as a ragdoll, and tucks Hobbes into his jacket pocket.

“Thank you so much for everything,” Laurel whispers on their way out the door, distributing cheek kisses. “He was perfect.”

“Mmm, little angel,” Oliver says dryly.

Ted shakes Oliver’s free hand firmly. “Naw, man, we were glad to have him.”

At home, Jonny wakes up just enough for Oliver to get him into pajamas, and then he goes right back to sleep.

“I love when we wear him out this thoroughly,” Oliver murmurs, turning out the nightlight. “He should be a ringbearer every night.”

“I’ll start checking the social pages,” Felicity says in a voice that cracks and breaks with exhaustion. “Book him up for the rest of the year.”

Oliver slips out into the hallway with her, and his smile fades. “We wore you out too.”

“A little bit, yeah.”

In the master bedroom, Felicity takes off her jewelry, and then she lets Oliver undress her. She can reach her own zipper just fine, and there are no tricky hooks or clasps. But he likes to do it for her, and she likes having it done. Especially when she is as brittle as she feels right now.

“Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?” Oliver says as he works her dress off her shoulders.

She turns her head and pins his hand between her chin and shoulder.

With his free hand, he strokes her hair, then pulls her snug against his chest.

She lets her head fall back on his shoulder. “I’m not pregnant.”

He goes very still. Doesn’t even breathe for a moment. Then he works her dress down her hips, helps her step out of it, and lays it over the armchair. She turns around, and it’s nice, how thoroughly and completely he wraps her up. There are perks to marrying a man half again her size.

“It’s all right,” he says, and kisses her hair. “It’s not like it’s some terrible chore to keep trying.”

She smiles into his silk lapel, and she reaches deeper under his dinner jacket and starts unbuttoning his suspenders.

He leans back, raising an eyebrow hopefully. “Right now?”

She gives him a patient smile, shaking her head. “How do you think I realized I wasn’t pregnant?”

His eyes dart sideways. “Right.”

“I love you dearly, but no thank you. Just let me help you out of all the buttons and straps and clippy bits.” She slides his dinner jacket off his shoulders, and then she starts working on his waistcoat. “Black tie is pretty much the only time your clothing is more complicated than mine.”

He does not need her help, but he likes having it. Nor does she need him to carry her to bed, but she likes that he does.

For their mutual joy.


	13. Magnetic north

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In [this chapter](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5019088/chapters/13936674) of [_The Book of Love_](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5019088), right after The Bratva Thing, Felicity observes that Jon gets grabby when you scare him. A few people expressed an interest in what happened when Jon and Tish got home that night.
> 
> Warning for content: this chapter contains explicit sex of the BDSM variety, plus a lot of Jon's filthy mouth.

After all the gunfire and screaming, the lair is strangely quiet.

Mr. Queen, Mr. Diggle, and Jon are still in the showers, washing away other men’s blood and the smell of cordite. Mrs. Queen keeps one eye on her monitors as SCPD arrives at the Bratva’s trashed and empty conference room, and she stays on the phone with Maggie Carter, whose connections got Tish into the building.

“Over the next few weeks, the bugs we planted are going to give us everything we need to put him away,” Mrs. Queen is saying. “No, I am positive they didn’t notice. They were a little distracted.” Pause. “By, ah, getting punched in the face. Just lay low for a while, all right? And are you okay for - yeah. I’ll wire more if you need it.”

Perched on a rolling chair, Tish starts to shake.

“Oh, there it is,” Mrs. Queen says, getting to her feet with a smile, as if the trembles are all according to plan. “That’ll be the adrenaline comedown.” She wraps Tish in a gray blanket soft as rabbit fur, and she gestures to the electric kettle steaming on the table. “You like chamomile, right?”

“Yes, I do.”

Not for the first time, Mrs. Queen squeezes Tish’s wrist and says, “Everything’s all right, you know.”

Also not for the first time, Tish says, “If I had been a little quicker on the uptake, I could have covered for that slip. We could have gotten what we needed without a shot fired.”

“And pass up the chance to rip new holes in the Bratva’s enforcers?” says Mr. Diggle, emerging from the lockers dressed as casually as Tish has ever seen him, in a T-shirt and athletic pants. He slings his bag high on his shoulder, and he gives her a tired smile. “Nothing wrong with improvising. No plan survives first contact.”

“Especially not when your trigger-happy boyfriend is on the other end of the comm,” Mrs. Queen says, ripping open the packets of two tea bags. She sets two mugs to steep, and she turns back to Tish with a sigh. “I shouldn’t have given him a direct line to you. That was my mistake.”

Tish’s fingers clench in the blanket. “I was afraid someone would get hurt, and it would be my fault.”

Strange way to phrase it, she realizes belatedly. A dozen people got hurt very badly. It was just luck that none of them was anybody she cared about. One left darkening bruises all up and down her arm in the shape of his fingers, and a few moments later an arrow pinned his palm to the wall. Perhaps she should examine the vindictive pleasure she felt.

Later. Right now, Mrs. Queen is reaching over to unpin her blonde wig.

“Ooh, one little guy does not want to come out,” she says, tilting her head sideways and frowning fiercely at a stubborn bobby pin. Finally she eases the wig off and lays it aside. “It wouldn’t be your fault, honey. I promise you, it would not.”

It has been ten years since Maman died, but she still sneaks up on Tish in moments like this. Hot, soothing drinks. Dexterous hands unpinning her braids, finger-combing them out around her face. It has been a very long time indeed.

The locker room doors swing open again. Mr. Queen comes through, dressed in this morning’s suit as if he did not just crash a Bratva meeting and personally knock out their captain’s teeth. He heads straight for Tish, and he tucks the blanket tighter around her. “You’re all right?”

“I’m fine.” She smiles up at him, and she hopes he won’t hug her. To choke up in front of Team Arrow would surpass her quota of embarrassment for the night.

“Thank you for getting us in,” Mr. Queen says, so sincerely that she has to drop her eyes.

“I didn’t really… “ She catches sight of Mrs. Queen raising her eyebrows, and she revises. “Thank you for getting me out.”

Mr. Diggle shakes his head, as if he is tempted to laugh off her gratitude. “That’s what we were there for.”

Jon appears, wearing Tish’s favorite of his button-down shirts, with his hair still wet and spiky. He nods acknowledgment to the original Team Arrow, and he tips his chin up and says, “Mom, you talked to Maggie?”

“She’s up to speed, and she’s safe,” Mrs. Queen says. “Come on over here for debrief.”

He comes to stand behind Tish’s chair, rests his hands on her shoulders, and leans over her to get a good look at the monitors.

As the team talks strategy, she hardly hears a word. She is too distracted by the smell of freshly showered Jonathan. Twice, he reaches down for her mug and takes a few sips of her tea, and each time she is tempted to kiss his fingers when he sets them on her shoulder again.

What she really wants is to lean back against his stomach and let him cradle her head in his hands - one covering her forehead, one cupping her jaw. Thumb pressed against the corner of her mouth. He would probably do it, if she nudged him.

God knows what his parents would make of that.

Finally, when her tea is cold dregs, it’s time to go.

“Are you coming back to the house?” Mrs. Queen asks Jon and Tish, folding the blanket up neatly.

Tish tips her head back and looks into Jon’s eyes upside down. If she nods, tonight they will sleep under Oliver and Felicity Queen’s roof, which Tish considers the safest place in the world outside of maybe the presidential bunker under the White House. The bed in Jon’s old room is both huge and sinfully soft.

But she only looks at him.

“No,” Jon says quietly. “I’m going to take her home.”

 

 

In the car, he reaches for her hand, and she twines her fingers with his. Any moment now, she expects him to look over earnestly and say, Please no more field work.

To get it over with, she offers him: “Any time you want to say I told you so.”

“Don’t see how I could.” He squeezes her fingers hard enough to make her hiss in protest, and he winces and eases up. “Sorry, baby. But you planted the tech, I got to shoot the shitheads, and we all came home in one piece.”

“Klokov made me.”

“That was shitty luck, and we’re going to have to look out for Maggie for the next few weeks. But I’d call it a win.”

She loosens her seatbelt enough to stretch across the center console and lay her face against his upper arm. “You hated it.”

“Every second.” At the red light, he looks her in the eyes. “But the last time somebody tried to kill you, there was nothing I could do, you know?”

It was two years ago, and he has only told her in fragments about his chat with Shaula at Iron Heights, about all the rage and helpless terror. About the two minutes he spent believing her dead. She kisses the seam at his shoulder, and she nods.

“At least tonight was the devil we know,” he says. “Something I can fight.” Then he quirks a grin at her. “And should I be worried about what a phenomenal liar you are? Nerves of fucking steel.”

“It’s amazing how much easier it is to be brave when there are three large men with deadly weapons standing by to whisk you away.”

He kisses the top of her head, and he drives on.

 

 

At home, the second the door closes behind them, Jon tugs her into a hug. “Come here. Need to hold you for a minute.”

Willingly she melts into his arms. “As long as you like.”

He rubs her back, and she can’t help pressing closer to him. Crushing her breasts against his chest, going up on tiptoe to bury her face in his neck. He bends his knees to help, and then he runs his hands over her ass to pull her hips closer.

That’s all it takes.

She slides down his body and hits her knees in front of him. Looks up into his eyes.

Apprehension crosses his face, and she is afraid he will say no. Not tonight. Not after what just happened.

Jon was not the one who first suggested it would be hot if he tied her to the bedpost. Or took a riding crop to her backside. Or murmured such filthy, disrespectful things in her ear that she blushed for days afterward just thinking about them.

“I mean, I can do that, if you want,” he said the first time she asked him to bind her arms behind her back. “Mostly I’m used to tying up bad guys, but knots are knots, right?” He scratched the back of his neck. “It’s just, ah. I would’ve expected you to have bad, _bad_ associations with bondage.”

Occasionally she still had nightmares about Risdon’s breath on her neck while he tied her to a pipe, or his leering parody of gentleness when he blindfolded her. She knew what it was to be at the mercy of a very bad man.

“The point is that it’s you,” she said quietly, leaning back into Jon’s arms. “Make me as vulnerable as I can be, and I’m still safe. Because it’s you.”

“Oh.” After that, he seemed to have a hard time finding words. Instead he covered her forehead with his hand, cupped her jaw, and held her gently. Finally he cleared his throat and said, “Now you’re just fluffing my ego.”

“I’m serious, Jon.” She splayed her hands on his thighs. “You don’t have to minimize it.”

“Ok,” he murmured. “Yeah, we can do that.”

A year and a half later, he has come to need this as much as she does. Especially after a bad scare.

“Makes me feel like you need me,” he once told her. “Like I’m giving you something no one else can. Like I’m… I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Enough.”

For someone who grew up blanketed in affection and unconditional love, he needs a surprising amount of affirmation.

So tonight he pets her hair and says, “Close your eyes.”

She obeys on a long, grateful exhale.

“Keep them closed until I say.”

Jon’s speaking voice is a bright-timbred tenor. The Arrow’s voice changer turns it to something unrecognizable, and Tish doesn’t mind saying that before she knew who was under the hood, she found it intimidating.

This baritone growl is something else entirely. He uses it just for her.

“Yes, Jon.”

He unwinds the scarf around her neck, and in three efficient motions he blindfolds her with it. Then fingers slide under the hem of her borrowed dress, and he peels it away over her head. Warm hands pop the closure of her bra, and it too slips off and disappears.

Footsteps. The leather chair creaks, and Jon says, “Crawl to my voice.”

She feels her way across hardwood and carpet - “Over here, sweetheart. That’s it. Keep coming” - and finally she finds his shoe. Her hands glide up his thighs, and he spreads his legs, lifts her up between them, and drapes her over his knee. He smells like soap and fresh cotton, and his belt is smooth against her cheek.

Then his thumb hooks in the elastic of her panties, and he drags them down to mid-thigh. Somehow it feels more vulnerable than if he had taken them off entirely.

Gently, he drums his fingers on the curve of her ass. “You’re going to count for me, and after ten you’re going to thank me. Understand?”

“Yes, Jon.”

Then there is silence and stillness. She noses closer to his hip, and her fingers twist tighter in his shirt. Waiting for the first blow is the hard part.

Finally, it falls. It is gentle - more surprise than pain - but she startles and clings tighter. “One.”

On the next, his hand comes down with a beautiful, satisfying noise, at the exact angle to make her gasp into the fabric of his pants. “Two.”

“It’s all right.” With his free hand, he pats her fingers twined in his belt loop, as if to remind her that all she has to do is tap out. Twice for gentler, three times for stop. They use red-yellow-green as well, but she spends enough time gagged or subverbal that a hand signal seemed prudent. “You can take it. You’re all right.”

On the third smack of his hand, she manages to hold back the whimper. On the fourth, she can’t.

“Are you wet for me?” he says, and reaches down to find out. “Oh, fuck.” He actually chuckles a little bit. Then he sinks a finger into her slow, and left-handed he spanks her again.

With every blow, her grip on his leg tightens, and she crumples a handful of shirt smaller in her fist. She presses her face into his side and breathes deep.

On the sixth blow, tears leak from her eyes, and he works a second finger inside her. On the seventh, she starts gasping his name, pushing back on his hand.

“Three more, baby. Touch yourself. Come on, get your hand between your legs. And keep count.”

Trembling faintly, she obeys. His hand falls, and she counts eight. “I’m so close. Please can I–?”

He hits her harder. Smack, right on the border of her pain tolerance, and she makes an embarrassingly high-pitched noise. Jerks in his lap and bows her back. His fingers sink deeper, and the scream turns to a moan.

The orgasm leaves her weak but still wanting. If he let her, she would slide to the floor right now, but he wraps her up one-armed and holds her snug.

“Tish,” he says when she has gone quiet. “I said count.”

“Nine,” she whispers.

“That’s it, baby.” He eases his fingers out of her and glides them over her clit. She squirms away from too much, too soon. “Jesus, I think you’re dripping on my rug.”

She twists in his grip to ask, “One more?”

There is a long pause, and then he claps his cupped hand to the back of her thigh. It’s loud, but it doesn’t hurt at all.

“Ten,” she sighs, nuzzling into his side again.

His hands are warm, soothing over her sore, bare skin and magnifying the heat of his handprints. “What do you say?”

“Thank you.”

“That’s it.” He tugs her panties the rest of the way off, lifts her into his lap, and guides her legs around his hips. “Now come on. Arms around my neck and hold tight.”

He carries her to his bedroom - she can tell by the creak of floorboards - and he lays her down on his cool, silky sheets.

“Stay right here,” she says, clinging to his neck, just for the pleasure of being told no.

He smacks the outside of her hip - “You don’t give me orders” - and disentangles her arms. “And I’m not going far.”

His warmth and smell move away, and, sightless, she follows as far as she dares, leaning toward the rustle of his shirt stripping off and the sound of wicker sliding on hardwood. She wants his hand on her cheek, a kiss, a touch - something.

“Hands over your head,” he says. “Wrists together.”

She obeys, and next moment he winds a thick length of rope around her wrists. She wiggles her hands to test the snugness, and then she strains upward and kisses the nearest bit of him she can find - which feels like it is probably his elbow - in approval. He ties off the knot.

She squirms into the mattress, waiting for his hands to glide over her body.

Instead he pulls her onto her side at the edge of the bed, and he lifts her up to lean on her elbows and her bound hands. His belt buckle clinks, she hears a zipper, and fabric rustles and falls to the floor. Hard, silk-smooth skin presses against her lips.

“Suck my cock, sweetheart.”

She licks at the salt of precome, and then willingly she opens her mouth to him. Slow and shallow at first, but she takes more and more, proud of the curses and moans she draws out of him.

“Deeper,” he says. “Come on, I know you can.”

She wants to. Wants to please him. She lengthens her neck, and finally he hits the back of her throat.

“That’s it. You do that so well. Feel how hard you get me?”

The hand she had been waiting for smooths over her hip, and she opens her thighs to him. His fingers find her clit, and gratefully she swallows him down as far as she can, works the muscles of her throat around him.

He makes her favorite noise she has yet heard, and he starts to move in her mouth.

All she has to do is take him, let him slide in and out. Rock her hips faintly against his hand, breathe when she’s able. The words, _Yes, that’s it, fuck my mouth_ float into her head out of nowhere, and suddenly she is even wetter for him.

“You are so good,” he keeps saying. “Feel so fucking good. That’s it, that’s my sweet girl.”

Then he pushes in too deep, too long. She holds her breath and bears it, until–

“Mm mm mm,” she protests, closing her knees around his arm.

Immediately he pulls out. “You ok?”

Panting, she says, “I do need to breathe occasionally.”

“Shit, sorry.” His hand slides under her hair to hold the back of her head, and she leans back into his grip.

“Please will you just touch me?” she says as he lays her down, bound hands resting between her breasts. “Everywhere you can?”

For the first time tonight, he kisses her. Gentle and lingering, and then he murmurs, “Yeah, I can do that.” Another kiss, punctuated with a playful peck, and then he puts her hands over her head and tethers the trailing end of rope to his headboard.

The mattress dips as he climbs in bed next to her, and then warm hands run up her body. She arches her back to ask for attention to her breasts.

“You said everywhere,” he reminds her. “If you meant ‘play with my tits,’ you should have said that instead.”

She squirms impatiently into the mattress, tugging uselessly at the rope.

First Jon ghosts his fingers over her thighs and stomach. Then he finds sensitive skin everywhere but where she wants him - the curve of her neck, the undersides of her arms, her ticklish ribs.

She gasps in grateful relief when he finally closes his mouth around one nipple and twists the other between his fingers. But it’s not enough.

“Jon, please, you’ve got me so wet, I need you to touch me. Please.”

He slides a finger into her, and he pinches her nipple hard.

She cries out, which is perhaps why he sounds a little pleased with himself when he says, “You want me to fuck you?”

“Yes. Yes, I do, please.”

She can hear the smile in his voice when he says, “Tell me in French.”

She has told Jon things in French she did not have the courage to say in English, shameful as that may be. I want to take your name. I’m terrified I’ll lose you young. You’ll make an excellent father someday. I carry your heart with me, I carry it in my heart. The way the night knows itself with the moon, be that with me.

When he first told her to talk dirty to him, she was so shy he stifled a smile. “Maybe if you said it in a language where I had no clue what you were talking about?”

Now he just likes to hear it.

“ _Je te veux partout autour de moi, partout en moi._ ”

“More.” He slides another finger into her, and she spreads her legs wider for him. “Tell me how much you want it.”

“ _Prends-moi comment tu me veux. S’il te plaît, Jonathan. S'il te plaît._ ”

The ropes come undone in a few seconds, and firmly Jon guides her onto her hands and knees. He drapes himself over her and says right in her ear: “I’m going to take what’s mine.”

It isn’t a threat or a boast. He says it in the same tone he uses for _I’ve got you, baby, I’ve got you._

He slides into her slow, and the stretch and fullness and smooth wet slide make her moan. Trembles begin at her hips and sweep through her whole body. She needs him deeper, and he won’t give her more than a couple of inches. She tries to push backwards, and he spanks her hard.

“You want something?” he says, and his voice sounds strained. “Tell me.”

“I need you deep. Please can I have - please can you - yes.”

“Rub your clit. Come on, do it.”

She obeys as quickly as she can, and he wraps her up small. Chest pressed to her back, face in her neck, arms around her shoulders to gather her in. Fucks her slow and deep. When he opens his hand invitingly just beneath her face, she lays her cheek in his palm, lets him cradle her head.

“You’re mine. My good girl, taking my cock so well. You fucking love it, don’t you?”

“Please, I need more.”

“I know you do. Going to give it to you. Going to take care of my girl.”

She turns her head just enough to kiss and suck on his fingers, until finally he slides two of them into her mouth.

“I’m going to fuck you hard.”

She nods frantically.

“Don’t you dare come until I tell you.”

She makes a noise of assent, gagged on his hand.

Then he’s pounding into her, making a whimpering mess of her. She braces her hips and sucks on his fingers and just _needs_.

“All mine,” he keeps panting into her hair. “My sweet girl. Fuck, I love you. Can’t wait to come in your tight little cunt. Love you so fucking much. That’s it, take my cock.”

It’s point and counterpoint - sacred and profane in the same breath - and she wants to belong to him. Give herself up, body and soul, so that there can be no question of her place in the universe ever again. She needs this - this one true thing. Magnetic north.

Her spine lengthens, body straining, and with her tongue she pushes his fingers out of her mouth. “Please, I need to come, please, Jon, can I come, please–”

“Do it. Come for me.”

“Jon–”

“Now.”

She comes screaming, and his pace doesn’t slow. She gasps for breath, and the orgasm won’t stop. It won’t stop, and he won’t stop, and finally she lets her hips fall, lets him flatten her to the mattress. Her breath hitches and halts, and she fights to keep it under control.

He buries himself inside her and holds there, pressed close against her back. “Good girl,” he breathes in her ear. “You are such a good girl.”

She lies crushed beneath him, sweaty face pressed into the sheets, and her gasps become little keens. “Jon.”

He slides the blindfold off, and his hand strokes her hair. “You okay?”

The steel in his grip, the sting of his hand, the depth of his voice - these things take her to the edge. But it’s his gentleness that takes her over.

She starts to cry.

He pulls out of her, and she shudders at the feeling. When he shifts onto his side next to her, she scrambles to plaster herself to his chest.

“Hey, I’ve got you, baby.” This is not his first rodeo, and he knows what to do. He doesn’t shush her, just rubs her back and mashes a kiss against her forehead, so that he’s half-muffled when he says, “I know it was a lot. Just cry it out. I’ve got you.”

If she could, she would give back his warmth, make him feel even a fraction of what he makes her feel. But words are beyond her. Only sighs and touches and the work of breathing in and out.

Slowly, she gets her breath back, but the sobs have left her languid and heavy as four or five glasses of wine. Jon holds her, and reality comes to her only as filtered through him. Him and whatever he asks of her next.

“Tish,” he says when she kisses his chest. “I want to fuck you some more.”

She makes a breathy noise. It was supposed to be “Okay,” but it fell somewhat short.

He shifts her onto her back and lays his index finger across her mouth. “Kiss for yes.”

She sucks a kiss on his knuckle.

The rest is a dream. She drifts, and his warm weight settles on top of her. His hand cradles her neck, and he wraps her leg around his hip. She smiles up at him, touches his face. Plays with his hair while he buries himself inside her. Rocks with him and sighs and loves him, loves him, loves him.

He comes with a soft, guttural noise she doesn’t often hear, and he lets his head drop down on the pillow next to hers.

Afterwards, she is vaguely aware of him wiping her down with a towel, finger-combing her sweaty hair away from her face. Then he gathers her into his lap, and she lays her head on his chest and lets her eyes flutter open and closed in a slow, intoxicated haze.

“How do you feel?” he murmurs.

It feels like it takes an hour to answer him, but the words come: “Safe. Held.”

He adjusts his grip and kisses her head. “Good.”

“Thank you,” she sighs. “Love you.”

When he says it back, with her ear pressed to his chest she feels as much as hears it.

After a while, she sleeps.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tish quotes poetry:
> 
> "i carry your heart with me, i carry it in my heart"
> 
> \- [e e cummings](http://allpoetry.com/i-carry-your-heart-with-me)
> 
> "The way the night knows itself with the moon, be that with me."
> 
> \- [Rumi, "In the Arc of Your Mallet"](http://www.rumi.org.uk/love_poems.html#InTheArcOfYourMallet)


	14. All the little familiar noises

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In [this chapter](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3578463/chapters/9129622) of _[Blood On My Name](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3578463)_ , Tish wakes up in the hospital in terrible pain. Oliver sits at her bedside, trying to keep her calm until Jon arrives.
> 
> Over on Tumblr, someone asked for certain scenes from Tish's point of view, and here's what happened...

It is pain that drags Tish back to consciousness. Pain and bright lights.

“Easy, easy,” says a familiar voice, but her insides are crushing in on themselves. The pressure generates searing heat deep inside her, and she writhes onto her side. Her eyes squeeze shut, and a scream sticks in her throat.

A big, cool hand covers her forehead, and it must be Jon. She was walking to the bath he drew, and then she… He must have caught her. Jon has her.

“Breathe, honey.”

No. It’s Mr. Queen combing her hair away from her face, the way she’s seen him do for Abby. There are tubes taped to her hand, and a machine is beeping, and it’s Mr. Queen’s hand steadying her shoulder, as delicately as if she might crumble to dust. Words drift through her head - _ashes to ashes_ \- and she can’t make her ribs expand past the pain.

“I know. I know,” he says, running his hand down her arm. “We’re at Starling General, and we’re getting you taken care of. Everything’s going to be all right. Just breathe.”

He doesn’t understand. “It hurts. My…” She presses her hands to her midsection, one on her belly and one on her back, just above her hips. “Here, it hurts.”

Mr. Queen looks back at her steadily, and in this moment he looks so much like Jon that she feels a flash of anger that he _isn’t_.

“I know it does. I’m sorry,” he says with such sincerity that the anger flickers out immediately. “The nurse is on his way.”

It is humiliating to whimper in front of someone so composed, but she can’t help it. “Quickly, please.”

“As soon as he can.”

Not good enough. She can’t stand another minute of this. She physically cannot. The nurse needs to get here in the next fifty-nine seconds, and there need to be painkillers. They need to knock her out, or they need to stop the red hot pressure inside her. It’s a hospital, isn’t it? They can’t expect her to lay here and _be like this_ for much longer.

Except they do.

The nurse comes, and Tish hardly has the attention span for his patient explanation of orellanine poisoning and its delayed action. “You’re awake again because the antitoxin is working,” he says brightly. “That’s a great sign. Really great sign that you’re back with us.” But something-something-drug-interactions-something, and in the end, it doesn’t matter how clearly she explains that the pain is ten out of ten, the worst she has ever felt. It doesn’t matter how many times she says please. There will be no opiates. He can do nothing else for her, and he has other patients to attend.

When he’s gone, Mr. Queen lays his hand on her head again, and she rolls a little closer to his other arm resting next to her. “I can’t do this,” she says, rocking faintly as if she can shake loose the clenching pressure. Do what, she isn’t sure. Make it to the next moment, and the next.

He finger-combs her hair again and says very firmly, “Yes, you can.” And he shifts his elbow closer to her on the mattress. “Hold on, if it helps.”

She twists her fingers in his sleeve, and that seems to be okay. Mr. Queen is not her father, and he is not the person she wants here next to her, but he is close enough. Steady and gentle, and he knows a thing or two about pain. He was not speaking from ignorance just now.

“Would you like me to go get Felicity or Abby?” he offers quietly. “Or anybody you want.”

She whispers, “Where’s Jon?”

Mr. Queen leans down close, as if to comfort her, and murmurs, “He went to find out which poison.”

“From _her_?”

“Yes.”

“She told him?”

“She was persuaded to, yes.” When she grimaces, Mr. Queen clarifies, “He didn’t beat it out of her.”

Shame.

“She’s on her way to ARGUS’ supermax now, and there won’t be any escaping. Believe me, sneakier people have tried.” He sits back and resumes running his hand up and down her arm, slow and deliberate. “She’ll never hurt you again.”

 _She hasn’t finished doing it_ this _time_ , Tish wants to snap. But this is Oliver Queen, so she doesn’t. “Is Jon coming?”

It’s faintly ridiculous that a boyfriend of less than a week is the person she wants most right now. Precarious, having no one more solidly her own. Pathetic to keep asking for him. But somehow, she has it in her head that the pain will recede if he comes through that door.

“He’s on his way right now.”

White-hot poker through her middle, and she hisses, “Could you tell him to hurry?”

“I don’t think he’s so much as pausing for red lights as it is.” Mr. Queen’s hand covers her head again. “There’s nobody else you want?”

She only presses her forehead against his arm and tightens her fingers in his sleeve.

Twenty minutes on the clock take two or three hours, at least. She tries sitting up, and it doesn’t help. Neither does crying or cursing or pounding her fist on the mattress. She rolls and rocks and writhes, and nothing helps.

“Try to be calm,” Mr. Queen keeps saying. “Calm and quiet. Come on, lay down and just breathe.”

She ends up back where she started, clinging to his arm. He plucks a tissue from the box at her bedside, and he dabs at the tear streaks on her face. Talks quietly to her, and the words don’t matter as much as the soothing, familiar voice.

Until he says, “Jon’s here.”

When Jon takes his father’s place next to her, the pain does not magically dissipate. But he pets her and holds her hand and eventually pulls her into his arms, and everything seems more manageable when he’s nearby. She makes it to the next moment, and the next.

Then he starts running his hand up and down her arm, asking her to breathe by his count, and she realizes what his father was quietly doing that whole time.

God. _Queens._

To her shame, Tish has envied Jon his family and their ease with each other. She has been viciously jealous, watching Jon sass his mother, watching Abby lay her head on her father’s shoulder. Neither has the vaguest shadow of a doubt that they are, to at least two people, the most precious things in the universe.

Whenever they complain about their parents, Tish wonders in silent impatience if they have any idea what they have. If they take it for granted, as though it were plentiful and free as oxygen.

“Now imagine yourself somewhere safe, somewhere you never have to be afraid,” Jon says in a low, soothing voice indistinguishable from his father’s. “Think about how it feels. How it smells. All the little familiar noises.”

They know what they have. Else Jon wouldn’t be who he is, petting her like he is. He wouldn’t be holding her so close that she feels quietly certain he’d trade places with her if he could.

“Where are you?” he says quietly.

The white hot pain fades to a red glow. She nestles even deeper into his arms. “ _Je suis ici_.”


	15. How he sounds when he drowns

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Over on Tumblr, Anonymous asked:
> 
>  
> 
> _Love hearing stuff from Tish's POV & despite how greedy it is there's (at least) three scenes I'd love to see from her POV if you ever got round to them: when Jon woke up after she & he had been held by Risdon and she'd found out he was the Arrow; the night of the riots when she first thought of kissing him(per previous drabble from her Pov); when he came to see her in the hospital after her poisoning._
> 
>  
> 
> Here is the first of those scenes, set during [chapter seven](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2741552/chapters/6905135) of _[The Man Under the Hood](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2741552/chapters/6144929)_.

“Jon’s awake?” Tish says, hovering in the doorway of Mrs. Queen’s home office. The hoarseness of her own voice surprises her.

Mrs. Queen offers up a wan smile. “He was for a little bit. You want to see him?”

Tish has not seen him since dawn, when Mr. Diggle and Mr. Queen carried him through the back door on a simple plastic backboard that looked odd in civilian hands. He was wrapped in a gray blanket, and he was nearly as pale and bruised-looking as Papa laid out under bright lights on the medical examiner’s table.

Abby got to her feet, just as Mrs. Queen and Elaine Diggle came through the door. Mrs. Queen held up a hand and said a preemptive, “It’s all right. He’s going to be fine.”

“He doesn’t look fine,” Abby said. “What happened?”

Tish had known the whole time. She had curled up on the sofa where Mr. Diggle left her, and she had watched Abby get more and more worked up about what the hell happened to Jonny. Knew. Said nothing.

For hours, said nothing and nothing. Felt - cold.

“We’re going to let him explain when he can,” Mr. Queen said, making the kind of extremely deliberate eye contact that would force Tish’s eyes to the floor if it were aimed at her. Abby, however, just looked back with an open, searching expression, as if she’d believe anything her father told her right then. “For the moment, let’s just focus on getting him taken care of.”

“Why isn’t he at a hospital?”

“Abby,” said Mrs. Queen, in a voice flat with exhaustion, and her eyes shone with tears. “You will get an explanation. Soon.”

Tish reached for Abby’s wrist and tugged her gently down onto the sofa next to her. The whole tired, miserable procession disappeared upstairs.

In the twenty-four hours since, Tish hasn’t spoken once, not even to answer Abby’s kindly meant questions and condolences. She has slept only briefly, because she’s been startled awake repeatedly by a gun at her temple. Click.

Perhaps that’s why her voice sounds so strange in her own ears. “If he’s feeling up to it, I’d like to talk to him.”

Mrs. Queen nods. “Next time he wakes up, I’ll come get you.”

Sleeping off a beating and near-drowning and gunshot wound apparently takes some time. It’s a few hours before Tish gets the go-ahead, which should be plenty of time to collect her thoughts.

And yet, when she leans in Jon’s doorway and finds him awake and propped up on pillows, she cannot think of a single thing to say except the idiotically obvious, “How are you feeling?”

He gives that the attention it deserves, which is none. “Have a seat.”

She takes the armchair right at the bedside, and she does not know how to begin. This close, she can see his eyes are red with burst blood vessels, and bruises are blooming on his brow and cheekbone. She remembers the noises he made when he got them.

How do you talk to an acquaintance, knowing how they sound when they drown?

“Relax, princess.”

Ah. He’s going to treat this as completely and totally normal. That’s how. “No, thank you. Not for a while, I don’t think.”

In the brief silence that follows, he casts about for something to say. Lands on, “I’m sorry about your father.”

Condolences grate like lies. Tish is not sure that even she is sorry Papa is dead.

It must show on her face, because Jon changes tack. “I’m sorry you’re hurting.”

It’s the right thing, the kindest thing, and she doesn’t want it from him. Her fingers twist together in her lap. “Please don’t say that. You’re the one who got hurt, and I think it might have been my fault.” She does not mean to keep talking, but perhaps things have built up in all of her silence since she walked out of the morgue. “Your family has been frighteningly nice to me anyway. Your mom just started lending me clothes, as if it went without saying that I’d stay here, and your dad’s only explanation was, ‘You need a safe place to sleep.’”

In her peripheral vision, she can sense Jon’s expression tipping closer and closer to pity, and she doesn’t want that from him either. The point was not to come in here and make him feel sorry for her.

Finally, she looks him in the face, and what she sees there is not pity. No, she would call it compassion.

She whispers,  “I thought we were going to die.”

“Yeah, me too,” he says with a smile. “‘Specially when you took the gun.”

For the first time in what feels like days, she laughs. It feels strange, and it untwists something in her chest. His smile broadens at having made her smile, and on her next exhale she knows exactly what she came in here to say. “This is going to sound selfish, but when the blindfold came off, and I saw who you were, the first thing I felt was relief.”

Before that, she’d been terrified the Arrow would die, and she would be alone with a psychopath and a corpse. Then Risdon ripped away the blindfold, she opened her eyes, and part of her was surprised that the Arrow had a face at all.

But most of her was seeing the guy who knelt on the practice room floor with his sister, laid her hand on his chest, and said, _Breathe with me_.

Jon’s mouth twists wryly. “I guess when you’re that scared, any familiar face will do.”

“Not because of that.” In the car, he didn’t seem to mind her holding his hand. She is almost bold enough to do it again, but she stops a few inches short. “You know Abby feels very safe with you.”

At first Tish took him for arrogant, and to some extent he is. But just occasionally, compliments make him glance away with something like shyness.

She waits until he looks back at her to say, “I knew there had to be a reason.”

“Thank you for jumping him when you did. Saved my life.”

It was a team effort. “Thanks for the scalpel.”

“I was aiming for Risdon.”

She giggles. “Oh my God, that is terrifying.”

Again, he looks pleased to have made her smile, and this time she is bold enough to slip her hand into his. His eyes are glazing over a little bit, and she should probably let him sleep soon. But there is one more thing he needs to understand.

Before Mr. Diggle took her to the morgue to identify her father, he sat her down in the Queens’ living room on their cream-colored sofa.

“Tell me the truth,” she said, staring at the floor. “Should I have gone to the police instead?”

“You’d be dead.” He pulled a plush blanket from behind her and wrapped it around her shoulders. “The Hand has a policy.”

Her stomach twisted.

“None of this is on you, sweetheart.” He pulled up a chair nearly knee to knee with her, and he leaned on his elbows and looked her in the eyes. “Now. Can you tell me what happened before we got there? Just walk me through it.”

She did not try to describe the gasps and gurgles and muffled screams. Instead she tried to recall with perfect precision every word spoken, question posed, and threat made. All except the one against Abby that made Jon’s face so blank and empty.

“It’s all right,” Mr. Diggle kept repeating, and every time he said it, she realized dimly that she was shaking. “You’re doing great. What happened next?”

When she was finished, he held her gently by the shoulders and said, “Now listen, this is important. The police are going to ask you to tell this same story, and when you do… you were taken alone. Jonny - the Arrow - he wasn’t there with you.” He was giving firm orders, but she could see in his earnest expression how well he understood the power this secret had put in her hands. “There was no tub of water, no fight, no gunshot. Just you, tied up ‘til we came to get you. Do you understand?”

“So you’re a vigilante too,” she said quietly.

He released her shoulders and sat back in his chair. “I’m someone who cares about that kid.”

How to make him believe this? “When I asked for help, he showed up. I’m fairly certain he could have escaped and let them kill me, but he didn’t.” She pulled the blanket tighter around her. “I’m going to keep his secret, Mr. Diggle.”

He crossed his arms and gave her a deep nod.

So when McKenna Hall said, “Tell us as much as you can,” Tish did exactly as she was asked. She told as much as she could, and no more.

Now Jon’s fingers are slowly relaxing, curled around hers, and she can see his eyelids getting heavier. Mrs. Queen said they’d been rather generous with the opioids.

So, one last thing: “You know I’m not going to tell anyone about your, um, volunteer work.”

His only answer is a vague, pleasant hum.

She isn’t ready to leave quite yet. Instead she lays her head down on her arm and waits for him to fall asleep.

Mrs. Queen wakes her some time later for dinner, and she disentangles her hand from Jon’s and goes downstairs.


	16. Vigil

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> With Starling on the verge of riots, Tish and Abby watch and wait. Set during [chapter ten](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2741552/chapters/7166681) of [The Man Under the Hood](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2741552).

“Hey, have you seen Jonny?”

“Not for an hour at least.”

Abby glances around the room fretfully, and her knuckles whiten on the doorframe.

Tish sits up, frowning at her. “I promise he’s not hiding in the closet.”

“Right.” Abby shakes her head, shifting anxiously from foot to foot. “Sorry, I’ve just run out of places he could be, and he’s not answering his phone.”

Mayor-Elect Queen has already been summoned to the protest lines, and the news alerts popping up on Tish’s phone have progressed from  _ Unrest at Bioethics Conference _ to  _ Duwamish Blocked Off _ and finally to  _ Fires Set in Nuxalk Corridor _ . She is fairly certain she knows where Jon has gone, but she offers up a perfectly reasonable alternative: “Perhaps he just needed a little time to himself.”

“Then he should have told someone,” Abby grumbles, pulling her phone from her pocket for a quick check. “This is not a good time to disappear. I promise you, if Uncle Roy were here, he’d be pissed.”

Tish hardly knew the man, but his name gives her a twinge anyway. You cannot spend days with a family, immersed in their grief, and not feel some of it yourself.

The afternoon she first sat down in Roy Harper’s office at Panoptic, he wore a stylish side part, a reassuring smile, and the grace of a man very much at ease in his good suit. You’d never guess that the Glades raised him, or that he didn’t learn to knot a tie properly until his thirties.

“Mr. Harper,” she said, “I didn’t feel unsafe until men with earpieces started following me around everywhere.”

He came around his desk to lean against the front of it. “Look, chances are nothing happens. I’ve read a lot of hate mail, and what your dad’s been getting? Ten to one it’s all bullshit.” The word sounded strange coming from just above that beautiful necktie. Apparently the Glades still shone through sometimes.

“So I should only be a little bit worried.”

He shook his head. “Nah. We’re going to do the worrying.” Then he smiled at her, and oh, he might have been a married man thirty years her senior, but that smile could give anyone a little flutter. “We’re not going to let anything happen to you, Miss Cuvier.”

When Jon told her, with a shoddy attempt at secrecy and discretion, that some of his “colleagues” would be watching over her while she met with a mob captain, she was grateful that one of them would be Mr. Harper.

They buried him this morning. For a data library full of bleeding edge medical research, the Black Hand was willing to torture and murder. Papa was willing to let her die. And Roy Harper stood up straight and took a bullet through the neck.

Tish is in so far over her head, she doesn’t even know which way to kick for the surface. She is in a house full of strange and extraordinary people with more money than God, more tragic backstory than a Bronte novel, and far more hugging than she is accustomed to. They discuss painful, wrenching family matters in front of her, and they scoff every time she offers them their privacy. In their home she feels snug and safe in the depths of an exotic foreign country, comfortable and uncomfortable by turns.

Now Jonathan has disappeared, while somewhere out there in the dark, a sociopath is running loose, and he knows the Arrow’s name.

One problem at a time.

Tish and Abby make another pass through the house, which is littered with empty glasses and leftover trays from the funeral reception. They find Mrs. Queen at the kitchen table, talking very quietly to her sister-in-law, who hardly seems to register a word.

Mrs. Queen frowns at Abby. “He wasn’t upstairs?” Her frown deepens at the answering head shake.

Thea Queen leans her elbows on the table and rubs her temples. Weariness is the first human emotion Tish has seen her express all day, aside from anger. A missing nephew is one more complication than the woman is equipped to handle tonight.

Mrs. Queen presses her lips together, and she gives her ponytail an irritable little toss. “Baby gates. I swear, we’re going to go back to leashes and baby gates.” She lays her hand over Thea’s - they all touch each other so casually - and says, “I’m sorry to run out on you, but - “

“Go,” Thea says, waving her off. “Go on.”

Mrs. Queen gathers her coat and purse, hugs her daughter, and heads for the door.

After it closes behind her, Abby sinks into her vacated chair and casts an anxious, sideways glance at her aunt. “We’re assuming he snuck out,” she says, hunching her shoulders and hugging herself.  “Remember that time Mom disappeared out of our backyard while three hundred people and a whole team of bodyguards were here?”

Thea reaches out and squeezes Abby’s shoulder. “He snuck out, baby. It’s all right.”

Tish starts gathering plates, and Thea and Abby only surface from their separate reveries at the sound of running water. “Don’t wash dishes,” they tell her, but what else is there to do? Stare into space or compulsively refresh the newsfeed. Neither of those seems appealing.

Fifteen minutes later, a text burbles up on Abby’s phone.

“Found him,” she reads aloud. “He decided to pick up an evening shift.”

“So he’s fine,” Thea says wearily. “Taking care of business.”

Abby turns to her in startled indignation. “His arm was in a sling this morning.”

“If he’d asked my permission, I wouldn’t have given him the go-ahead.” Thea heaves a sigh and slumps lower in her wheelchair. “But he didn’t.”

Tish has already made bets with herself as to which of Jon’s various mentors wore the hood before him, and she revises the odds on Roy Harper drastically upwards. To his wife, these are old, familiar fears.

Not so for Abby. “He just took off,” she fumes. “Didn’t bother to tell anyone where.”

Eyes closed, Thea nods. “Yeah, hooding up with no one on Watchtower is a dumb risk.”

Surprise flickers in Abby’s face; clearly she hadn’t thought of the tactical implications. She turns a shade paler and says, “It’s just, I thought the top secret classified confidential sneaking around was over.”

With the city on fire, she’s angry about being excluded. Sweet as she is, the girl is fifteen and very much the baby of her family. 

“He’s got backup now, and there’s nothing we can do to help from here,” Thea says, forcing herself a little more upright and gripping the handrims of her wheelchair. “I’m going to bed. Wake me up if something happens.”

“We’ll let you know,” Tish says quietly. She does not have Thea’s nerves of steel, and she knows better than to believe there is any chance of sleep tonight.

Thea spins on the spot and heads for the doorway, where she pauses and glances over her shoulder. “Scratch that. Wake me up if you need me.”

Tish takes one more look at her drawn face and defeated posture, and she resolves only to wake her in the event of disaster, death, or dismemberment.

At the last second, Abby hurries to catch up and hug her aunt. Tish hears a muffled murmur.

“Love you too, junebug,” says Thea, and kisses her head. “Thanks for everything you did today.”

When she’s gone, Abby gives Tish an embarrassed little shrug and says, “I didn’t really do anything.”

Yes, she did. Tish watched her do it all day, hovering near whichever family member needed her most. It was not always the person whom Tish judged closest to crying. In fact, most often it was stoic Mr. Queen whose arm Abby linked hers through at the funeral or whose shoulder she headbutted at the reception. 

Abby projects the evening news on the kitchen wall, and Tish puts the kettle on. If they plan to hold a vigil, they’ll need tea.

The helicopter cam pans over a burning police car, trash cans blazing in the streets, and shattered glass glittering in the reddish light. Chanting devolves to shouting then somehow resolves to chanting again. Reporters stand in front of destruction, describe the obvious, and portentously enumerate the things “we do not know at this time.”

No one set a single fire until they found out about Papa. Tish turns away and starts hunting for Earl Grey.

“Dad’s somewhere out there,” Abby says, eyes peeled for him. “I don’t know what he thinks he’s going to do in that crowd. Who could even hear him?”

The kettle whistles. Just as Tish takes it off the heat, the news anchor fills the screen with solemn urgency. “Breaking news. Just a few moments ago, an unknown gunman opened fire on City Hall. Three shots were fired, and Mayor Lee has sustained at least one gunshot wound. He is currently being rushed to medical help. The severity of his condition is unclear at this time, but - ”

“They’re shooting mayors now?” Abby sucks in a deep breath. “That’s on the table?”

They will shoot at teenage girls, or they will break their arms to make their fathers talk. They will pay each other in people, and they will kill for secrets pried out of tortured bodies. Everyone you know wears a mask, and sometimes when they take it off, they only become more strange to you.

Everything is on the table.

Onscreen, the anchors exchange worried platitudes, and the crawl at the bottom of the screen announces street closures. “We have word from the convention center that this news is being badly received by the gathered protesters. We are hoping to get some clarification on - ”

Then, a sudden cut to -

“ - and I’m not going anywhere.”

It’s a familiar voice, booming across Duwamish Square from a source Tish can’t pin down. The GNN camera drone swoops across the convention center and zooms in on the Arrow, who casts an imposing silhouette on the concrete facade behind him. He is lit up bright and larger than life, and his face is half shadow.

“ When this is over, the conference speakers and half of these protesters are going home. Those of us who have to stay and pick up the pieces - what kind of city do you want?”

Tish’s brain stalls out momentarily. “What is he…”

“Talking the crowd down from something stupid,” Abby supplies.

He has no real power here, Tish does not say. All they have to do is ignore him.

But they don’t. He makes a surprisingly punchy speech, and with thirty years of history giving his words weight… Starling listens. And then, with a last one liner in which Tish recognizes Jon Queen for a moment, the Arrow disappears again.

Abby seems totally unsurprised that he pulled it off, but the news anchors are, by the standards of a stoic profession, absolutely over the moon.

“The Arrow hasn’t addressed the city like this in over thirty years,” they say, and old footage flares to life onscreen. The man standing atop the car in the wreckage of the Nuxalk corridor, yelling across the crowd, looks like he could be Jon, brought there by a time machine.

But it isn’t over.

Brawls have broken out in the streets, and masked vigilantes are out in force. Abby cheers at a glimpse of the Canary, and a reporter onsite audibly gasps when he catches a few frames of the Batman.

The original Batman was active long before Tish was born, and his successor only appeared in her senior year of high school. Gotham was abuzz with the news, and Papa, who liked to hold forth at the dinner table, vocally disapproved. After the fourth or fifth boring tirade on the subject, Tish developed a vague affection for the Batman out of silent spite.

Now she listens to the reports of him breaking up street fights, and she feels a surge of pride.

GNN locates the Arrow again quickly, and they cut to a drone feed in the Central Business District, where an office building is burning. F ire hoses sweep the ravaged top floors above the flashing lights and sirens and ladders.  “A pipe bomb was detonated on the fifteenth floor,” says the anchor. “And a moment ago, the Arrow was spotted touching down on the roof.” 

“I don’t see him,” Abby says anxiously.

“There.”

He rappels down from the roof, quick and confident, and on the third floor from the top he shoves powerfully off the wall and then cannonballs feet-first into a window. Cracks shoot through it to the frame. He shoves off again, and this time - smash. He tumbles into the smoke and disappears.

“The vigilante has entered the building!” the reporter repeats several times, and they replay the footage in fuzzy closeup. “The Arrow is inside!”

Tish only realizes she’s holding her breath when Abby releases hers.

“Did he just break into a burning building?” Abby whispers in abject horror.

“It’ll be all right,” Tish says, wrapping an arm around her again. “You saw how he climbed in, like he’s practiced a hundred times. He knows what he’s doing.”

“What he’s doing is stupid!”

On the right-hand side of the building, a dark shape swings down from above and clings to the ornate facade. The Batman looks shadowy and dramatic by the light of a burning office building, and he skitters a few meters sideways as easy as walking on flat ground. He finds a window already busted in by the initial explosion, and he slips inside.

“There,” Tish says, with forced optimism. “Jon’s got backup.”

Abby only shrinks deeper into herself. She cannot have failed to notice that the Bat and Terry McGinnis showed up in town at the same time, or that one is watching the Arrow’s back as closely as the other watches Jon’s. It feels like bad manners to discuss it out loud, so Tish only squeezes Abby tighter.

“I can’t see them,” Abby says.

“Give them a moment.”

Abby takes a deep, purposeful breath, and for a few seconds she manages to keep still. The onsite reporter provides useless, repetitive narration while they watch and wait.

And wait.

When the suspense starts to fray her nerves, Tish closes her eyes and asks for a little courage. Lord, you are my refuge and strength, an ever-present help in times of trouble. Watch over them and -

“They should have come out by now,” Abby says, and she writhes out of Tish’s grip as if she cannot stand the inside of her own skin.

“I have no idea how long these things are supposed to take. Just give them time.”

An almighty crash sends dust and flames blooming from the windows, up at the rightmost corner of the building. Metal shrieks, bricks crumble from the facade.

Tish jumps in her seat, and a horrible nauseous flutter goes through her whole body. Next to her, Abby sucks in a high-pitched gasp that sounds almost painful.

The reporter onsite startles too, then puts his fingers to his ear. “The fourteenth floor has partially collapsed.” He pauses, listens. Continues: “It has already been cleared. I repeat, the collapsed floor was cleared. No evacuees or first responders remain on that level.”

But Abby doesn’t seem to hear him. She has frozen like a prey animal, white and wide-eyed. Tish has seen her this way once before, and she tries to stop the anxiety attack before it can escalate.

“No one was on that floor,” she says, putting her arm around Abby again and holding her firmly. “Jon wasn’t on that floor.” She isn’t certain that’s true, because it’s unlikely the fire department can precisely track the Batman or the Arrow’s whereabouts. But there was no reason for them to be on that floor if no one else was. “It’s all right.” Breathe in, breathe out. Big and dramatic enough for Abby to feel it and fall into rhythm. “It’s all right, he knows what he’s doing.”

“I hate this,” Abby whispers after a few moments, and if she can talk, Tish counts that as success. “I really hate this.”

Tish reaches for the remote. “We don’t have to watch.”

Abby twists around to look her in the eyes. “It’s Jonny.”

So it is.

Twelve days ago, he and Tish nearly died together. For the rest of her life, however she may feel about him, she will never be indifferent to Jonathan Queen. She can’t look away any more than Abby can.

It is probably all right to say this out loud: “Lord, please watch over them and keep them from harm.”

Abby turns to her in surprise, but then she nods, leans into Tish’ side, and says, “And maybe send us some chill, if you’ve got extra.”

Twenty seconds grind by like twenty minutes. Finally, the reporter announces, “The vigilantes have just exited the building on the south side! They have a survivor with them.”

Coverage flips to a drone cam swinging around the corner, and through the smoke a green hood and a black cowl come into view down on the sidewalk. The Batman and the Arrow are each supporting one end of a makeshift stretcher. The woman strapped to it is holding tightly to the Arrow’s wrist.

Abby’s breath leaves her all in a rush, and the first thing she says is, “Is that a coffee table they put her on?”

Faintly, Tish nods. “I think so. With the legs snapped off.”

First responders rush to take the coffee table off the vigilantes’ hands, and on the sofa the girls relax against each other.

Then the Batman and the Arrow turn right back around and run into the smoke.

Abby lets out a disbelieving noise.

“Oh,” Tish says quietly.

“ _ Damn _ it, Jonny.”

It’s a very long night.

For hours they track the news coverage, straining for a glimpse or a mention of anyone they know. Six times over, they watch the same clip of the Black Canary ending a street brawl with two swipes of her staff. They watch shaky cell phone footage of the Batman scaling a fire escape to fall on a cornered cop before he can pull his gun, and the surrounding masked men scatter.

“That’s right,” Tish says with a smile. “Give them a little Gotham.”

Mr. Queen appears periodically, often standing outside one of SCPD’s mobile units, deep in conference with Detective Hall. A few times, he gives a terse update to the cameras. Yes, this fire has been doused. No, we have no further information on Mayor Lee’s condition. Please, for your safety, we ask that you avoid the following streets.

He does not have the flashy presence of the Arrow, standing on high with hundreds of watts of spotlight making him larger than life. But he commands attention as though it were his due, and he gives orders in the comfortable expectation that they will be obeyed. Tish wonders if he learned that in a board room.

It would be impolite to ask Abby where else he might have learned it, especially if she has no such suspicions herself.

They go through two pots of tea and one of coffee, and they watch the flames burn themselves out. An hour after the city has fallen quiet, both girls are still too wired and wrung out to sleep.

Besides, they’re waiting on someone.

At sunup, Jon eases through the back door, moving stiffly and holding his injured arm close to his body.

Tish has been watching him all night, and that feels strange. All she wants now is to mother him, and that is strange too. She wants to sit him down, administer bruise cream, and feed him soup and ibuprofen. He looks like one good hug would turn him to complete marshmallow - perhaps the kind of hug he gave her the night Risdon came to Papa’s house, right after she watched enviously as Abby walked into Mr. Queen’s arms. She isn’t sure she has the right, and besides, someone else has precedence. She looks to Abby.

Who promptly snaps,  “Don’t ever do that again.”

Jon tips his head back, and his hooded eyes would look insolent if you didn’t know how many consecutive hours he’d been awake. “Do what?”

“Disappear.”

Tish presses her lips together while Abby fusses at him. Had anyone else greeted him with a lecture, they would have been getting off easy with a sarcastic dismissal. But for Abby he stands there and takes it. In fact, he takes it very much to heart.

Funny how everything he says sounds more sincere when he’s saying it to her.

Finally, curt with exhaustion, Abby says good night and goes upstairs. She leaves her dirty dishes on the counter, as her brother and her aunt often do. Mr. and Mrs. Queen will be annoyed if they come home to sticky plates and mugs. Automatically Tish gathers them up.

“Hey, um.” Jon gives one last guilty glance to the doorway she disappeared through. “How bad?”

It’s difficult to explain how intensely Abby seems to feel everything - as if her nerves have been stripped bare, and there is no layer of protection between herself and the world. It is not Jon’s fault, and Tish doesn’t want him looking so miserable over it. Gently, she says, “She was pretty upset.”

“Like, piano lid upset?”

She is tempted to lie, but finds that she can’t when he is looking directly at her. “I was worried for a minute, but no.”

He collapses onto a stool at the kitchen counter. “God damn it.”

There is only one thing to do now, which is the same thing Mama used to do when someone was at her kitchen table in need of comfort. This will require a whisk, a saucepan, and the high quality milk and cream in the fridge. The rest depends on whatever is hiding in the spice cabinet.

Tish pulls down vanilla and honey, and with her back to Jon, she says, “We watched you on the news.” Then, because someone ought to tell him: “You did some really incredible things last night, you know that?”

He only grunts in reply. Then he deflates, his head falls onto his arms, and he makes more discontented noises while she searches for whole nutmeg and a little grinder.

The ritual of  _ lait chaud a la cannelle _ is soothing in itself, and by the time Tish has frothed up two mugs of it, she is feeling warm and a little drowsy. She sets one down next to him. “Here.”

He gives her a look. “Stop being nice to me.”

It is what she has been feeling since the night the Queens took her in. She still cannot fathom why they have decided to make her safety their responsibility, and every day she wants to tell them, Thank you, but that’s enough. Don’t pour on more kindness I’ll never be able to repay.

So she answers Jon just as they have, with the same heedless good humor. “Nope.” And she dares to pet him a little bit, the way his mother or his sister or his aunt probably would, if any of them were here.

He sighs deeply, his shoulders unknit, and he drinks what she made for him. It’s an odd thing to take pride in, but she does.

Then, almost casually, he leans his head against her arm. She blinks in surprise and holds perfectly still, as if a wild bird were eating from her palm. His cheek is cool against her upper arm, and she can feel his breath on her skin.

It would be easy to lean down and kiss him, if she wanted to.

Before another thought can follow that one, she whispers, “Go get some sleep.”

Wordlessly he heads upstairs, and she clears away the dishes.


	17. The facts, the truth, the lies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Over on Tumblr, Anonymous asked:** In chapter 1 of blood on my name, you reference Abby going to Oliver whilst he cries over Jon. Could you possibly write this as a drabble preeeeety please? I love Oliver supporting Abby, so would be amazing to see it in reverse
> 
>  **Another anon asked:** Would you possibly let us into the minds of Felicity and Oliver during the mansion scene? I’ve just discovered your fics and I am LOVING them

In a mellow green waiting room dotted with soothing houseplants, Oliver grips his wife’s hand a little tighter and leans closer. “How much do we tell McKenna?”

“A hundred percent honesty.” Felicity lays her head delicately against his shoulder. “Right up until we lie.”

As with every Arrow-related hospital visit, there is never enough time to come up with a seamless narrative. There are a hundred little lies and omissions to be coordinated, and there are a thousand details of physical evidence to be explained. Tonight they will bank on the fact that McKenna almost certainly doesn’t _want_ to arrest anyone for putting down a rabid dog like Joseph Risdon. It would be terrible press, and she has not yet earned the public’s trust.

Oliver’s eyes lock on the TV hung high in the corner. On GNN Risdon’s long-outdated mugshot appears next to the anchor, and the closed captioning reads, _About an hour ago, Mayor Oliver Queen and his family were recovered from the long-abandoned former residence of the Queen family. The motives for their abduction are not yet known_.

Felicity must be reading too. “Definitely not because anybody might be the Arrow,” she sighs. “Definitely not that.”

“No,” Oliver says slowly. “The connection is there to be made, for anyone who’s looking. It’s on record, who sent him to prison. He took us for revenge on the Arrow. He just… had the wrong family.”

Felicity’s mouth rounds thoughtfully. “If that’s the story, then from now on, anyone else accusing us of any connection to the Arrow will be spouting the same conspiracy theory as confirmed psychopath Joseph Risdon.”

“We can weaponize that.”

“McKenna has watched you get mistaken for the hood guy before,” Felicity points out, warming to the idea. “One time, there were handcuffs and an ankle monitor.”

“I recall.” He takes a deep breath. “The six bodies?”

It was not guilt that made him hesitate, and the way Felicity rubs her cheek against his shoulder, as if to reassure him that he did the right thing, is quite unnecessary. Those men threatened his children, and now they are dead. It was a matter of action and reaction, mechanistic as atoms bouncing off each other.

The problem is that, had Panoptic killed them, they would have a set of neat entrance wounds at center mass and gaping, messy exit wounds on the other side. Instead there is a slashed throat, a snapped neck, a severed brachial artery, two traumatic brain injuries, and a face caved in with the butt of a pistol.

The three messiest were Jon’s doing. It was Oliver who taught him how.

“There were vigilantes on the scene, along with John and Lyla,” Felicity says. “We could… let SCPD draw the obvious conclusion.”

“I don’t like pinning it on Terry, and you know Bruce would be livid.”

“Sara would happily take credit for all six. Assassin, remember?”

“It’s safest not to give specifics,” Oliver says firmly. “We broke free, and we were making a run for it when Panoptic found us. We can’t tell her how those men died, because we don’t know for sure.”

Felicity sags against his shoulder on a long sigh. “Are we really going to ask Abby to toe that line?”

Lying to authority figures is terrifying if you haven’t had much practice. This will be an ongoing lie, one that lays another row of bricks atop the wall between Abby and everyone who wasn’t in that room last night. She won’t be able to talk to friends or therapists about the truth of what she saw. The lie will isolate her, and it isn’t fair.

Oliver squeezes Felicity’s hand again. “Yes, we’re going to ask her for that.”

“Or else a criminal homicide investigation.”

He nods. “Or else.”

She turns her face into his shoulder. “For what it’s worth, I don’t think there’s a jury in the state that would convict him. After what Risdon did to him, what he threatened to do to Abby…. He could give a full confession, and they’d let him walk.” Her fingers curl around his forearm. “Get a jury box full of parents, and they might even pat him on the back on his way out.”

Oliver closes his eyes briefly. While he was chained to that fireplace grate, he planned to the last detail how he would peel Risdon’s face back over his skull. How he would tear his heart out of his ribcage and feed it to him. Jon got there first and killed the bastard with wild brutality. Oliver would have done it with surgical cruelty.

He has not been an assassin or an interrogator or a ruthless survivalist for more than thirty years, but the instinct never leaves. You bury it deep inside you. It comes when you call.

He swallows hard. “We cannot end up in a courtroom with those kinds of questions.”

“I know.” Felicity takes a deep breath and sits up straight. “I know that.”

They grip each other’s hands, and in half-murmurs they straighten out their story. By the time McKenna comes to find them, they have fallen into exhausted silence.

The new police chief takes a seat across from them, settling her bag next to her, and she greets them with a gentle, “How’s Jon?”

“Still in surgery,” Felicity says. “It’ll be a few hours. Apparently stringing bones back together is tricky.”

“It takes some time, yeah.” McKenna says with a brief attempt at a smile, and once upon a time Oliver might have felt a twinge of comfortable, decades-old guilt. Tonight he is too tired for that.

McKenna looks at the floor for a moment, and then she lays a hand on the zipper of the bag next to her. “You’ve been through hell, and I hate to ask you to relive it. But you know that, sooner or later, I need a statement.”

Oliver leans forward. “Let’s get ahead of the rumor mill, if nothing else.” In the few hours that Risdon held them, the city’s fevered imagination had plenty of time to go to work. Thea mentioned that some of the less reputable press outlets have already come up with salacious speculation.

Oliver has read none of it, but he knows people. He can imagine.

“Okay.” McKenna pulls her glassbook from her bag, and she sets it up to record. “Walk me through it. From the beginning.”

For all the bad he’s lived through, Oliver has only rarely had to describe it to anyone. It’s not so difficult, if you’ve had years of practice stepping outside your own body. There are the facts of what happened, and there are the facts that should have happened but didn’t, and you take a deep breath and you just talk.

McKenna can never _know_ what happened, not even in principle, for the same reason Dig rarely talks about Afghanistan. The truest war stories all sound the same, he once told Oliver and Felicity, deep in after-dinner drinks.

“Over and over, the same damn thing,” he said, frowning at his cognac. “One guy says, ‘We all went up to Gettysburg, the summer of ‘63, and some of us came back from there, and that’s all except the details.’ A hundred years later in southeast Asia, it’s, ‘Patrol went up the mountain. One man came back. He died before he could tell us what happened.’”

Felicity made a truly priceless face at him. “Okay, you got me,” she admitted. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Oliver knew. It means, _I was there. You were not. Anything I told you about it in words would be tantamount to a lie._

He can give McKenna neither the facts nor the truth. It’s freeing, in a way. He takes a deep breath, and he just talks.

He regained consciousness to find himself restrained in the ruins of his parents’ and grandparents’ library. The moon was overhead but not yet very high; it was early still. Abby was zip-tied nearby, Felicity cuffed to an O-ring bolted to the floor, and Jon suspended like meat in a slaughterhouse. No one had sustained worse than a concussion. They had been carefully spaced; none could quite touch each other.

Then Risdon strolled in.

McKenna looks up from her glassbook, fingers poised to make another note. “Did he tell you why he took you?”

“The Arrow sent him to prison all those years ago,” Oliver says calmly, and he’s gratified by McKenna’s unsurprised nod. “He seemed to believe SCPD’s initial theory about the Hood’s identity.”

There is a flash of wholly undeserved guilt on McKenna’s face, but there is no helping it. “So this was payback.”

Felicity sits up straighter. “He said he was going to pay it all back on Abby and Jon. Everything that happened to him in Iron Heights.”

McKenna holds her gaze for a few moments, unblinking. She has undoubtedly read Risdon’s file as carefully as they have. She knows about the cracked ribs, the twice-fractured orbital bone, the multiple stab wounds. There was at least one rape that the prison doctors knew about and likely more assaults that they didn’t.

Finally, McKenna nods, and she looks at Oliver again. “Okay. Then what happened?”

Then Risdon went to work. By instinct and long experience, he knew how to utilize the space, to modulate his body language, and to manipulate suspense for maximum intimidation. Oliver recognized each technique moment by moment. The most creative twist of the knife was the moment Risdon offered Jon a way out - “This stops the second you tell me which of them is going to take your place.”

Oliver and Felicity were both desperate to do exactly that, but it was not to them that Risdon offered the choice. Jon shook his head, and it began.

McKenna shifts slightly in her chair, drawing Oliver’s eyes. She is watching his expression intently, and behind the mask of professionalism there is something else. No one has looked at him that way since the first few weeks after he came home from Lian Yu, when every inhabitant of his old life seemed deeply uneasy with the robotic stranger wearing Ollie’s skin.

Oliver clears his throat. “He had a pair of brass knuckles and a knife. Started with punches to the stomach, ribs, face. He, ah, tore a gash in Jon’s arm.” Oliver demonstrates where on his own arm. “He was… methodical.”

“Backing up a little bit,” Felicity interrupts. “Before the beating. He threatened Abby with - well, his exact words were, ‘I swear I won’t leave a mark on her,’ but he said it with a leer and one hand on his belt buckle, so I’m going to call that a threat.”

Oliver falls silent.

Very evenly, McKenna says, “Do we need to do a kit? Sooner is better than later.”

Every voluntary muscle in Oliver’s throat seems paralyzed.

Felicity shakes her head hard. “You’d have known first thing. He never got the chance. But I think it’s important for you to know exactly what he was.”

“It is,” McKenna says. “Thank you for the level of detail you’re giving me. I know it’s hard.” And she adjusts her glassbook and gives them her quiet attention again. That is their cue to continue the story.

Oliver can’t speak.

Felicity slips her hand into his, sits forward in her chair, and picks up where he left off.

She tells the story they wove between them. The escape, the frantic run for it. Jon was injured and moving slow. Risdon caught up to them and shot him at close range. Oliver knocked him unconscious, and they hauled Jon down to the first floor, where Panoptic found them. The whole way, they heard crashes and thuds and screams echoing behind them.

“And then the ambulance arrived, and you know the rest.”

McKenna asks a few routine follow-up questions, all of which Felicity can answer truthfully. A few times, Oliver opens his mouth to pitch in, but the words don’t come.

Finally, McKenna puts away her glassbook, and after she zips up the bag, she sits staring at it for a moment. After a long, thoughtful silence, she says, “I saw Risdon’s body.” She looks Oliver in the face. “He died of extreme blunt force trauma to the head.”

He finds his voice again, because now he needs it. “I only hit him once. He’d just shot my son, so you’ll understand why I left him on the floor and didn’t stick around to monitor his condition.”

“Of course,” she says, very deliberately. “That one blow wasn’t the cause of death. There were a lot more after that one. As in, his face was completely bashed in. If you’d been anywhere near him when it happened, it’d be all over your clothes.”

It was all over Jon. Oliver had to call his name three times before he seemed to hear, and another two to get him to listen. Jon finally looked up from the pulpy mess of the man he’d killed, and his eyes were very blue in the mask of red. They are Felicity’s eyes; everyone says so. But it was himself that Oliver recognized in that face.

He has never told his son the story of the first man he ever killed, nor has he explained how every corpse made the next that much easier. Before, Jon wouldn't have understood. Oliver would have said something like, "You can go down that road, but you know what it's paved with and you know where it’s going. There won't be any signposts to tell you when you’ve gone too far." Before tonight, it would have been tantamount to a lie.

Maybe Jon doesn't need the warning. He is his mother’s son, deep down.

Lyla cleaned the kid up as best she could before the ambulance arrived, and she cut away his blood-drenched shirt and quietly disposed of it.

“There were vigilantes onsite,” McKenna says. “That always complicates things.”

“The Arrow?” Oliver says, because in this town it’s the natural assumption.

“It’s possible. We have confirmed sightings of the Batman and the Canary nearby, and we know they were working with him during the riots. If Risdon was an old enemy, then maybe the Arrow…” McKenna shrugs. “Maybe he took it personally.”

Yes. Vigilantes complicate things.

McKenna lays her hands in her lap. “I’ll need to talk to Abby and to John and Lyla Diggle too." She looks away for a moment, pursing her lips, and then she meets their eyes again. "But that can wait until tomorrow.”

She knows.

She knows exactly what Joseph Risdon was, and she knows she will never find conclusive evidence that a vigilante murdered him as he lay unconscious in that hallway. She knows why Jon’s shirt disappeared into thin air, and she knows there are questions to which she does not want the answers.

It’s what they were counting on. Oliver could sag with relief.

McKenna gets to her feet, and she holds out her hand to Felicity and Oliver in turn. “I’m so sorry this happened. Anything you need from me, you just let me know.”

Then she’s gone.

Felicity curls into Oliver’s side again, and he fits his body to hers. He plays with her hands, gently turning them over to examine the darkening bruises around her wrists. When she has stopped sniffling, she says, “I want my kids.”

He nods. “Let’s go find Abby.”

She is right where they left her, in yet another waiting room. This one is a mellow blue and dotted with soothing mass-produced art. It has been entirely commandeered by the Queen family contingent. Thea and Elaine sit on either side of Abby, and John and Lyla are doing a slow pace from window to window. Laurel and Sara are in the corner, dozing with their heads leaned together, but they stir into alertness when Oliver and Felicity come in.

“Any news?” John says.

“We just gave McKenna a statement,” Oliver says, and he can tell from the Diggles’ expressions that what they heard was, “We just told the police chief some lies.”

They are nodding along, perfectly prepared to perjure themselves, even though he has not yet told them how.

He needs to sit down.

As soon as he does, Abby comes over to sit next to him, and he puts an arm over her shoulders.

The next few hours take several days. Twice the surgeon comes by to update them, and the news is good. Four or five times, Abby dozes off and then jerks awake in a panic. Once, Felicity says, “Junebug, come with me for a little bit,” and the two of them slip quietly into the Interfaith Meditation Chapel. Fifteen minutes later, they come out again, no closer to peace than before.

Finally, Jon is out of surgery.

“They’re taking him to a private room. Don’t cram everybody in there at once,” the surgeon says, looking around at the nine people in the waiting room. “Mr. and Mrs. Queen, why don’t you come with me first?”

Jon is hardly recognizable, his battered face has swollen up so badly. Machines blip along reassuringly, but altogether there are fewer invasive tubes than Oliver expected; modern medicine is a curious thing. On the lower half of Jon’s leg, a black electromyographic cast ripples with blue light periodically.

“Hey, kiddo,” Felicity says, taking a seat next to his sleeping head. Very carefully, she brushes his hair away from his face. “It’s good to see you.”

Oliver watches, curiously numb, and replays the catalog of damage. Hairline fracture to the orbital bone, torn stitches and further laceration of that half-healed gunshot wound, cracked ribs, torn-up knuckles and one broken pinky. One shattered tibia, surrounded by extensive soft tissue damage.

And bruises. All-over bruises.

“…clear from his injury pattern that he fought back hard,” Dr. Chawla is saying. Oliver isn’t sure how long she has been talking, but he takes a breath and forces himself to attend. “Seems like you’ve got a tough cookie here. With physical therapy, he can expect to recover full function.”

Oliver manages a quiet, “Thank you for everything.”

She glances between him and Felicity, and she starts drifting toward the door. “I’ll let you have some time with him.”

“You hear that?” Felicity murmurs to Jon. “You’re going to be just fine.”

They waited hours to see him, but now that he is here, watchable and touchable and verifiably alive, time passes much as it did in the waiting room. Family rotates in and out. Abby scrunches in next to Oliver on the little sofa by the window, and she dozes and startles awake, dozes and startles awake. Sometime soon, they will have to explain what she must tell McKenna tomorrow, but they can’t bring themselves to have that conversation just yet.

Tish Cuvier arrives around seven in the morning with a bag full of clothes for everyone. After a long, oddly shy look at Jon, she convinces Abby to go with her in search of breakfast. Felicity asks the nurses if there is somewhere she can shower, and she goes to clean up.

Oliver takes the chair in the corner, and he waits with Jon.

When he and Felicity first brought baby Jonny home from Starling General, they woke six times during the night to check that he was still breathing. In the weeks that followed, Oliver’s nightmares were of broken windows and empty cribs, and he was almost grateful when Jonny’s crying dragged him out of bed. With time, the new parent terror faded, and so did the dreams.

Not long after Abby was born, Oliver dreamt of Slade for the first time in years. “I am killing you, Oliver,” he said, laying his hand on Jonny’s head, holding the baby on his hip. “Only more slowly than you would like.”

Oliver always woke before Slade could make him choose.

“Dad?” Abby says very quietly in the doorway.

He sniffles hard, and he wipes his face. “Hey.”

She gives him big sympathetic eyes, and she gestures with the cup in her hand. “I brought you coffee.”

He takes a deep breath and sits up straighter. “Thank you, baby.”

She brings it over, but he reaches for her, not the coffee. She sets it aside, and she lets him gather her up.

He holds on for a long time. Holds on, here in the quiet with his kids, until the world comes calling again.


	18. The old guard and the new

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Terry McGinnis learns the Big Green Secret.
> 
> Set during Legacy.

“You’re on the next flight back to Starling,” said Mr. Wayne, sounding even more gravelly than usual by phone.

At baggage claim in Gotham International, Terry yanked his suitcase from the carousel one-handed and adjusted the phone against his ear. “You couldn’t have decided this before I got on the plane home?” Every minute in the air, he had resented being called back to work while Mrs. Queen was missing. Turning right back around was exactly what he wanted, but he could not let this pass without a grumble.

“We didn’t have the information we have now,” Mr. Wayne replied, even and businesslike. “Your flight boards in forty minutes. Before you go, there are some things you should understand.”

Terry had known Mrs. Queen for years, eaten at her dining room table, and laughed at her stories about the old man as she had known him twenty years prior. She had welcomed Terry into her house with cheerful equanimity, even moments after discovering him and Jon attempting to beat each other up in her backyard. “Boys! Dinner,” was all she yelled to stop them.

When they sat down in the dining room not long after, she had turned to Terry and said brightly, “So, you’re Jonny’s big brother. I don’t know exactly how fraternities work, but I think that makes you my Phi Psi son-in-law.”

“We’re not married, Mom,” Queen had groused.

“Son-in-bylaws,” she had revised experimentally. “Pledge stepson. Whatever.” Then she had smiled at him, warm and easy. “It means you don’t need permission to root around in the fridge.”

If there were new leads on her disappearance, Terry was champing at the bit to run them down. Not only was this a vote of confidence in him from Mr. Wayne - an away mission after only ten weeks in the cowl - but it was personal. “Do we know where she is, or at least who has her?”

“We do,” Mr. Wayne said, and stopped there. God forbid he should elaborate in a forthright manner.

“Then I need my gear,” Terry pointed out irritably, “so I really hope you’re waiting up there at departures with a bag for me to - ”

“You aren’t going in uniform,” Mr. Wayne said with finality. “Starling has her own vigilante, and you’re going to look after his family while he retrieves his wife.”

“No one’s seen the Arrow or the Canary or any of them for fifteen years! And I’m more help in the field than I am babysitting.”

“The decision has been made. Oliver was grateful to know you would be watching over his daughter and niece.”

It was at this point that Terry began to suspect he had parsed a sentence wrong somewhere along the line. A possessive pronoun had been misplaced. Perhaps there was a dangling modifier. “Wait. Back up.” It sounded a lot like Mr. Wayne was implying that Oliver Queen was the Arrow. “What’s going on, exactly?”

Mr. Wayne cleared his throat. “Oliver Queen was the Arrow.”

“Oh,” Terry said, as if that made sense. Then he waited patiently for the Tetris tile to slot in somewhere among his thoughts. It didn’t, quite. “He was the…” Don’t say it out loud in a crowded baggage claim. “Right, got it,” he muttered, which was something of a fib.

“It will make more sense the longer you think about it,” Mr. Wayne said dryly. “Neither of the children know, and you will not be the one to tell them. You’ll have to go back through security. Better get a move on.”

More instructions would follow as needed. That much, at least, Terry was used to. Mr. Wayne kept his cards close to the vest and played them only with the most judicious timing.

Terry had about five hours in the air to think about it.

When he first met Mr. Queen halfway through sophomore year, he recognized something of Mr. Wayne in him. The total self-assurance was easily explained as the product of a privileged upbringing. The alert watchfulness might have been a remnant of five years marooned; maybe instincts like that, once woken, never went completely dormant again. As for the uneasy suspicion that Mr. Queen could back up his death glare with actual death - that had never been confirmed.

Until now.

His quick reflexes were not Terry’s imagination. His bad knee was not a sports injury. The panic room on his first floor was not paranoia.

It was simple, once you knew the foundational secret, to guess at the structure of the rest. Spartan was a trained marksman with probable military experience, and there was John Diggle standing conveniently nearby. The team had tech support capable of repurposing the Pentagon’s favorite toys, and there was Felicity Smoak Queen humming innocently in the general vicinity.

“It was a disappointment, parting ways with him,” the old man once said of the Arrow. “He was one of the most remarkable men I’ve ever known.”

This, coming from someone who had traveled the world specifically to meet remarkable people and rip off their juju. That one comment had made a hell of an impression on Terry.

Oliver Queen was the Arrow. Oh, man, Jon was going to have a fit.

The sense of giddy revelation did not last. Terry touched down in Starling to news that shots had been fired on the Queen home. One injured. No word on who or how badly.

He had the whole cab ride to imagine that injury had been Jon - or worse, Abby. Terry had seen a handful of gunshot wounds up close over the past few months, and he had far too many fresh and oozing mental images at his disposal. Who would shoot at Queen and his baby sister? It was like stomping on a litter of golden retrievers.

The old man should have let Terry take the suit, damn it. There were some faces in this town that needed bouncing off a concrete floor.

At Starling General, it was not terribly difficult to find the Queen-Diggle encampment. All Terry had to do was follow the trail of Panoptic bodyguards back to the waiting room where Roy Harper stood watch. He was pacing from the doorway of a recovery room, past Jon sprawled out asleep across two chairs, over to the windows and back. That was two family members accounted for, then.

Harper turned smartly at the sound of footsteps, and Terry realized with a jolt that he was looking at another of the old guard. This was Harper the private security professional, who personally taught hand-to-hand to Panoptic employees and who, in his late forties, could still turn a backflip off a diving board. This man had been Arsenal, once upon a time.

“Terry,” he said, walking over purposefully, and there may have been a new flicker of recognition in his eyes. “I didn’t know you were still in town.”

“I’m - well, Mr. Wayne sent me back. What happened? Who’s hurt? The news reports were pretty vague.”

Harper filled in the details - Lyla Diggle gutshot on the floor of the panic room, both the Queen siblings covered in blood, Elaine shaking next to her mother - with remarkable equanimity. He also took care to provide Panoptic’s best guesses about the lone rifleman likely responsible and their threat assessment going forward. Yes, he knew who he was talking to.

“How are they now?”

“The girls are asleep in Lyla’s room,” Harper said, gesturing at the half-open door. “As for him...” He nodded at the pile of sleeping Jon in the corner. “Could you hang out here for a few hours? Just keep him company. I’ve got to take care of something.”

“Of course. Whatever you guys need.”

“Thanks.” And on his way to the door, the actual real life Arsenal clapped Terry firmly on the shoulder.

As soon as he was gone, Terry followed the route he had taken. Doors, windows, recovery room. He passed Queen and went to look in on the patient and the girls. Lyla Diggle lay pale and still in the near bed, a heart monitor beeping reassuringly. In the bed closer to the window, a mane of black curls stood out against the white pillow, and a blonde head lay next to it. Both Elaine and Abby had fallen asleep on top of the thin blanket, still in their jeans and socks.

Terry paced back to the windows. Visited the nurses’ station. Checked his emails. Glanced at Jon again.

He had every intention of letting the guy sleep. He’d had a hard day. He got shot at.

Five minutes later, Terry retrieved a bag of Cheetos from a nearby vending machine, pulled it open on his way across the waiting room, and leaned over and poked Queen in the ribs.

Jon was an agreeable sleeper, easy to wake and easy to drift right off again. You could say he was too agreeable. On road trips when half a pledge class squeezed into one hotel room, it was rock-paper-scissors to see who got stuck sharing with Queen. He was accustomed to having a huge bed to himself, and it showed. All attempts to shove him back on his side of the bed resulted in sleepy compliance followed by him starfishing out again or rolling over on your arm or doing some other jackass thing.

Since the morning Molaison woke up with an arm across his throat, Queen had been banished to the floor. “You’re my bro, and I love you, but the AC doesn’t crank high enough for your shit.”

He had taken it with good grace. Even brutally hungover, Queen woke up easy and pleasant.

This time, when Terry poked him, he sat up with a snarl.

Well, crap. “Queen.” The best thing was to do something normal, like this was a routine Sunday after a night at Fat Harry’s. Terry shoved the bag of Cheetos in his face. “You hungry?”

“What are you doing here?” Queen said, accusatory. “You’re supposed to be in Gotham.”

“I’m your big brother. Why do you think?” Terry did not say, because the kid was grumpy enough already without making a production of this. Instead he shook the Cheetos as if it were a bag of treats in front of a goldendoodle’s nose. “Hey, look, food.”

Jon extracted exactly one Cheeto from the bag, the weirdo. “How did you even know?”

The truth was unduly complicated, and a perfectly convenient explanation was hanging in the corner. Terry gestured up at the news coverage on the muted TV, where the Queen family’s business had become everyone’s business.

Jon’s lip curled faintly with resentment. “Oh.”

Serious question time: “How are you, man?”

A knee-jerk “I’m fine” was almost the answer, but to Terry’s surprise he caught himself and actually thought about it first. “We fight people for fun all the time,” he said in a slow, measured tone. “We’ve gotten in some real scrapes too.  You remember those bikers on spring break?”

The ones who hadn’t thought pool sharking was cute. Yes, they were memorable.

With his brow furrowed like that, Jon looked a lot like his dad. “But I didn’t know what it felt like to have someone honestly trying to kill me.”

The first time a bullet slammed into the Batman’s body armor and flattened Terry to the concrete, it had been rage and not terror that washed through his whole body. Some asshole had  _ shot  _ him. He was going to twist the fucker’s head off like a bottle cap.

“Remember that it isn’t personal,” Mr. Wayne had told him afterwards. “It’s not that they want Terry McGinnis dead in particular. They’re shooting at the uniform, at the obstacle in their way. You have to keep your head.”

“Dude shot me,” Terry had grumbled. “It felt pretty personal.”

Most people went their whole lives never knowing what it felt like to have someone look right at them and genuinely want them dead. Jon wasn’t going to be among them.

Terry sighed. “I’m sorry you found out.”

After that, neither was in much of a mood to talk. Terry kept up the occasional circuit of the doors and windows, and Queen worked his way through the bag of Cheetos. Eighty percent of managing life-or-death situations, in Terry’s few months of experience, was turning out to be waiting. You had to wait strategically, in the right place with the right equipment. But you definitely had to fucking wait.

Past midnight, something finally happened. Mr. Queen and Mr. Diggle came striding out of the elevators, and Terry was on his feet before he knew how he had gotten there.

He was acutely aware that he was no longer looking at Jon’s dad and Jon’s godfather. They were on the clock, and everything about the way they held themselves and the way they moved reflected that.

Terry reached out to shake the Arrow’s hand. “Mr. Queen.”

The recognition was clearly mutual. “Terry.” Mr. Wayne must have broken with tradition and done some explaining.

“Um,” Jon said awkwardly. “The hell are you doing?”

Shaking Spartan’s hand, that’s what. Terry had been occasionally hanging out with these guys for years and never given them their due.

“Bruce sent you?” Mr. Diggle said.

He had indeed, and Terry took more than a little pride in that. “The old man thought you could use a hand.”

“He’s not wrong. Panoptic’s compromised, and we need all the help we can get.”

“What can I do?”

“Our safe house is no longer secure,” Mr. Queen said. “Roy is making other arrangements now. If you could back him up for the duration, we’d appreciate it.”

A few hours ago, Terry had been bitching at the prospect of babysitting. Looking these two men in the face, he would gladly handle their dry cleaning if they told him it was vital mission support. “Of course. When do we leave?”

“Dad. Dig.” Jon shouldered into the circle the three of them had unconsciously formed. “You said soon. Is it soon yet?”

Terry felt bad for him - really, he did. It sucked, being locked out of the loop when your family was at stake. But he also had to bite the inside of his cheek at what a kindergartener Queen could sound like sometimes.

Mr. Diggle stepped right out of the line of fire. “I’ll go wake the girls.”

Mr. Queen watched him go for a moment, eyes lingering on the room where his daughter slept, and then he took a deep breath and turned to Jon. “We believe the organization that’s holding Mom is threatening our whole family to force her to comply with their demands. It’s not safe to rely on Panoptic’s resources right now, so Elaine and Abby only go with people we trust.”

“Um.” After a couple of startled blinks, Queen managed to say: “Oh?”

“An hour after the shooting, an extremely classified government agency suffered an attack on their secure system. Whoever did it clearly knew their way around the firewalls your mother designed.”

Jon’s head tipped slightly sideways, like a dog that’s heard a new noise. “Can you start again from ‘the organization that’s holding Mom’?”

He just needed a moment to process, and he’d catch up. Terry decided to keep the information moving. “They wanted her to hack her own work?”

Mr. Queen nodded. “Which meant putting her in front of a computer with an Internet connection.”

All unknowing, they put the Arrow’s hacker - whom the old man once described as “more frightening than an IRS auditor and a CIA analyst put together” - in front of a computer. With an Internet connection. “And they thought that was going to go well for them? That is adorable.”

“She got them in, and she did actually retrieve some files. Heavily-encrypted, extremely important-looking files. Requisitions for office supplies.”

Secret identities were the fucking best. “Adorable!”

“She also took the opportunity to pass us a message.”

“Polybius code?”

Next to Terry, Jon looked startled and slightly betrayed. “Dude, who even are you?”

Terry tried for a reassuring smile, because Team Arrow was obviously planning to explain themselves in a minute. But they were interrupted by two Diggles and a small Queen emerging from the recovery room. The pink, quilted overnight bag hung from Mr. Diggle’s shoulder. Time to relocate, then.

Abby went straight for her father - “You’re sending us away?” - and ouch, straight for the guilt trip.

“It’s only for a day or two,” he said, resting his hands on her shoulders. “Terry’s going to take you both someplace safe with Uncle Roy. Even I won’t know where it is.”

She glanced at her brother, who was still very clearly confused and very clearly pissed off about it. With big, pleading eyes, she said, “Why isn’t Jonny coming with us?”

What? Jon wasn’t coming?

“I need his help with something,” Mr. Queen said soothingly. “It’s important, honey. I wouldn’t ask either of you to do this if it wasn’t.”

He was taking Jon into the field. That was a bullshit decision if ever Terry had heard one. They had the actual Batman standing right next to them, but instead they were going to take a sophomore with zero combat experience. He could handle himself in a tournament, sure, but this wasn’t a game. For fuck’s sake, this was the guy who spent Christmas break with broken ribs because he couldn’t resist a dare. He was going to get himself killed.

The only person who looked more surprised than Terry was Jon himself. He was staring at his dad like he had just started speaking Tagalog.

“Roy is waiting for you downstairs,” Mr. Diggle said quietly to Terry, even as Mr. Queen bent down to console Abby. “East exit, over by the information desk. You know where?”

“It’s where I came in.”

Elaine sidled in close. “I don’t like leaving Mom.”

“She’ll have Panoptic looking after her,” Mr. Diggle said. “And she’d want you safe and away.  _ I _ want you safe and away.”

Terry stepped back politely to let the family say their goodbyes. Mr. Queen and Mr. Diggle made a minimum of fuss, and the only hug that lingered was Abby hanging onto her brother’s neck.

All right. If this was the plan, Terry could roll with it.

“Thank you,” Mr. Diggle said quietly as he passed the pink quilted bag to Terry. “And take care.”

“Yeah, you too.” Terry hefted the bag onto his shoulder. It was surprisingly heavy. “You ready?” he asked Abby.

Finally, she let go of Jon’s neck, and she put on a brave face. “Let’s go.”

Terry led the Arrow and Spartan’s daughters away, and he felt their eyes on him all the way to the elevator.

  
  



End file.
